Updated Draft TAG Finding: Associating Resources with Namespaces

Members of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) have published
a revised version of the Draft TAG Finding on "Associating Resources
with Namespaces." The draft responds to problems some commentators had
with the proposed RDF model. The document addresses the question of
how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.)
can be associated with a namespace. The names in a namespace form a
collection: (1) Sometimes it is a collection of element names --
DocBook and XHTML, for example; (2) sometimes it is a collection of
attribute names -- XLink, for example; (3) sometimes it is a collection
of functions -- XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model; (4) sometimes it
is a collection of properties -- FOAF; (5) sometimes it is a collection
of concepts (WordNet), and many other uses are likely to arise. There's
no requirement that the names in a namespace only identify items of a
single type; elements and attributes can both come from the same
namespace as could functions and concepts or any other homogeneous or
heterogeneous collection you can imagine. The names in a namespace can,
in theory at least, be defined to identify any thing or any number of
things. Given the wide variety of things that can be identified, it
follows that an equally wide variety of ancillary resources may be
relevant to a namespace. A namespace may have documentation
(specifications, reference material, tutorials, etc., perhaps in several
formats and several languages), schemas (in any of several forms),
stylesheets, software libraries, applications, or any other kind of
related resource. The names in a namespace likewise may have a range
of information associated with them. A user encountering a namespace
might want to find any or all of these related resources. In the absence
of any other information, a logical place to look for these resources,
or information about them, is at the location of the namespace URI itself.
The question remains: how can we best provide both human and machine
readable information at the namespace URI such that we can achieve the
good practice identified by web architecture? One early attempt was
RDDL; RDDL 1.0 is an XLink-based vocabulary for connecting a namespace
document to related resources and identifying their nature and purpose.
This finding therefore attempts to address the problem by considering
it in a more general fashion. We: define a conceptual model for
identifying related resources that is simple enough to garner community
consensus as a reasonable abstraction for the problem; show how RDDL 1.0
is one possible concrete syntax for this model; show how other concrete
syntaxes could be defined and identified in a way that would preserve
the model.