W3C + RDF – P.R. = 0
Before I begin (does that make sense?), I must first say that I think that the W3C – on the whole - do a fantastic job. The technologies and standards that are published are well thought-out, have thorough documentation, and truly drive the Internet forward.
Lately, though, my personal experiences have made me realise that, like every other organisation (commercial or not) on the planet, they still have weaknesses, particularly on the Public Relations and Customer Support front.
The W3C is a little different to most organisations. A small core team at M.I.T. is supplemented by many hundreds of additional 'part-time' participants, whose day jobs are with 'paid-up' W3C member organisations – most of which are large, multi-national I.T. companies.
Participation for member organisations is then held mainly through meetings and teleconferences, and for non-members, mailing lists are available, and member email addresses are published on the site for important contacts.
I’m a huge advocate of RDF, the W3C's primary technology for the 'Semantic Web', an improved Internet that has explicit metadata and context for the pages, applications, people and services of the Internet. I am therefore a subscriber of the W3C RDF developers list, where members can discuss the development and implementation of this exciting new standard.
The W3C provide icons for RDF content, so that a user/application can identify metadata for a given page. Whilst implementing these icons on our site, I had a small query, that although wasn't technical, could have infringed on some IPR or trademark. I therefore contacted the W3C member whose name was given as the contact for icon queries. I never received a response.
Shortly after, I was working on an idea for a central ontology, based on RDF, that could be referenced by other ontologies, to provide a simple mapping and help build the 'web' part of the Semantic Web. I asked some questions regarding this idea on the RDF developers list. I had one (extremely useful) response off-list, but none on the list. Even if the idea had been proposed before, was impossible, or just plain stupid, I would have been grateful for some feedback.
I then found a resource, created by a W3C member, that provided a huge step towards the central ontology idea. I emailed the member responsible for creating the resource, and asked about how it had been used previously, and about it's potential. I had no response.
If the W3C, and it's members, truly believe in making the web a better place (and not just a place for personal achievement), then they should be encouraging and supporting anyone who could help promote and implement these technologies.
