Towards an update of VoID

[Richard Cyganiak]

Hi all,

The VoID Guide [1] has been published as a SWIG Note more than a year ago. A lot has happened since:

• VoID has seen quite a bit of deployment
• SPARQL 1.1 has made tremendous progress, incl. SPARQL SD [2]
• SPARQL Update is getting more and more traction
• Other W3C groups are publishing drafts in closely related fields
• PROV-WG's work [3]
• GLD-WG's DCAT [4]
• The Linked Data Platform WG [5] will be starting soon
• Major work has happened around statistics for RDF datasets, e.g.:
• LOD-Stats [6]
• Böhm et al's work on creating VoID descriptions on web scale [7]

And, of course, we have quite a number of things that we postponed [8] to a future version since we didn't have enough time (or enough practical experience) to address them

Long story short, it might be time to think about re-starting the group's work, and commence work on an updated document. Call it VoID 2.1, or VoID 3.0, or whatever.

I'd be interested to hear what people here think about this. Is it a good idea? Would you contribute? Or is it too early and should we let the ecosystem around VoID develop a bit more before thinking about an update?

And if you want to see work on the next VoID update happen: How to organize the work? For VoID 2.0, we used this mailing list at Google Groups [8] and a Google Code project [9] plus ad-hoc Skype calls between the four editors. Is this ok going forward, or should the process be opened up to broader participation, e.g. via a W3C Community Group [10]?

Best,
Richard


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/void/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-service-description/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/charter
[5] http://aksw.org/projects/LODStats
[6] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2031001
[7] http://code.google.com/p/void-impl/issues/list?q=product=vocab
[8] http://groups.google.com/group/void-discussion
[9] http://code.google.com/p/void-impl
[10] http://www.w3.org/community/

[Jun Zhao]

Hi Richard,

I would be very interested in continuing my contribution, at least in
the provenance end.

From the point of the view of provenance, starting in the coming
months or so should be quite timely. The core part of prov-o ontology
is fairly stable, and adopting prov-o in VoID2.0 will also provide
nice feedback to the WG in the remaining few months of its life span.

And generally speaking, we are seeing more adoption of VoID now. Why wait?

About organization, I am still keen to keep the group small, but maybe
bigger than the four of us:) Even if you push things into a bigger
background, it's always down to a few people who do the core
contributions. That's just my thoughts.

Cheers,

Jun

[Keith Alexander]

Hi everybody!

I would also like to continue with VoID, and it is probably time to
pick up the things we postponed, as well as the other things that have
cropped up in the meantime.

I don't have strong opinions on the organisation, except perhaps a
preference for a faster iteration cycle, issue by issue (where
possible), rather than a long gestation period leading to a big
milestone release.

Best

Keith