Getting closer to a true Web standard for read-write Linked Data

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• Within about 2-3 weeks, the official Last Call draft of the Linked Data Platform should show up at http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/  (that is the URL of the "latest WG draft", so right now it redirects to the March 2013 2nd PWD which too stale to be worth reading). 
   
• This Last Call draft is the one to deeply review and provide comments on, both
  • editorial ("what are you talking about -here-?", "typo -there-") and
  • more substantial ("I have no idea how to implement that", "that's really hard to implement, but if you changed X it's a lot easier"). 
     
• In the "status of this document" section of the LC draft there will be a separate mailing list specifically for LC-draft comments, since the WG is required to respond to each one and demonstrate that it has done so in order to advance to later stages of spec maturity.
   
• If you want to start digesting it early, the editor's draft is at: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/ldpwg/raw-file/default/ldp.html but use the LC draft's comment procedure please.  As of yesterday, the editor's draft contains all normative (binding) content that the working group has in its queue.  It still has to go through an internal working group review before the LC draft gets published.

"Last Call" is an important milestone in the process to becoming a W3C standard (aka Recommendation) - it means the working group has a draft that addresses all the issues from the charter, and it is now mature enough for wide review.  Once we address Last Call review comments, implementations will begin in earnest (some are already working ahead on that, as is often the case).

Background

As Tivoli's (er, CSI's) official Linked Data, Loose Coupling, and OSLC maven I get to look across all of the integration scenarios and try to keep the implementations coloring within certain architectural lines.  I also get to talk to clients... very much UN-like when I started at IBM (ahem, "a few") years ago, and as a developer literally had to fight to meet one live and in person.

One thing I heard repeatedly at and after Pulse this year was: how do I "take action"?  Usually in the context of "that UI preview shows me what's wrong, now how do I fix it?"  Music to my ears.

You see, our platform architecture uses something called Linked Data, from our good friends Tim Berners-Lee et al. at the World Wide Web consortium.  While TimBL always intended for the Web to be a read-write space, until IBM started to use it in Jazz-based products and CSI's platform architecture Linked Data was in effect read-only (most shopping carts etc use other approaches).  It was technically possible to use it for read-write, but it wasn't happening in practice much and certainly not at enterprise scale.  Part of the reason was that there were holes in the standards, so "best practice" was 'it' and, like opinions, BPs were common, varied, and sometimes conflicting.  IBM started using an open community called OSLC to work on figuring out how to fill in the gaps.  This led to a W3C workshop and ultimately a submission from IBM and several partners.

We got community consensus, we now have read-write linked data implementations with several releases of history, so you can take actions.

Now we need to help this permeate outward, so you can take actions in all your tools using standard Web mechanisms.

OSLC spec and IBM Rational/CSI implementations are not directly affected; that will happen later, and should be backward compatible (always MY goal - grew up on mainframes).  The Linked Data Platform actually standardizes at least 50% of what's currently in OSLC Core.  Other efforts are getting underway that might do the same for additional Core 2 sections someday.  It's direct validation of the OSLC community's output; you'll see the same patterns in OSLC and Rational/CSI implementations, if you squint a bit. 

I expect the next version of OSLC Core, 3.0, to be based on the Linked Data Platform spec, and I think it's likely that Core 3 will be created in the OASIS standard organization instead of the OSLC community.  As Yoda said though, "Always in motion is the future."  Until it's in the past tense, anything can change (quantum mechanics assure us of that much!)