A new RDF Working Group charter has been announced.
One serious problem:
For all new features, backwards compatibility with the current version of RDF is of great importance. This means that all efforts should be made so that
- any valid RDF graphs (in terms of the RDF 2004 version) should remain valid in terms of a new version of RDF; and
- any RDF or RDFS entailment drawn on RDF graphs using the 2004 semantics should be valid entailment in terms of a new version of RDF and RDFS
Care should be taken to not jeopardize exisiting RDF deployment efforts and adoption. In case of doubt, the guideline should be not to include a feature in the set of additions if doing so might raise backward compatibility issues.
What puzzles me is why this mis-understanding of backwards compatibility continues to exist.
Any RDF graph would remain valid under 2004 RDF and 2004 semantics, remain 2004 semantics. OK, so?
What is the difficulty with labeling the new version of RDF, RDF-NG? With appropriate tokens in any syntax?
True, that might mean that 7 year old software and libraries might not continue to work. How many users do you think are intentionally using 7 year old software?
Ah, you mean you are still writing calls to 7 year old libraries in your software? Whose bad is that?
Same issue is about to come up in other circles, some closer to home than others.
*****
PS: This particularly annoying is that some vendors insist (falsely) that ISO is too slow for their product development models.
How can ISO be too slow if every error is enshrined forever in the name of backwards compatibility?
If RDF researchers haven’t learned anything they would do differently in RDF in the last seven years, well, that’s just sad.