Harry Halpin - Nominates to act on behalf of SemWeb CG, so that wires aren't crossed with DP Project

Asked about the W3C, and from a semantic web point of view, Harry provides the following view:

The W3C's plans are sort of amorphous, there's feeling in the SemWeb
community that FOAF needs to be stabilized a bit, and feeling from W3C
that it sure would prefer if DataPortability doesn't use technologies
that violate royalty-free patent policies (i.e. XRIs). I think the
ideal mode is that the W3C will keep mostly pretty quiet this year and
simply work out some of the kinks in the SemWeb story through an
Incubator Group that stabilizes FOAF, develops VCard mappings and XFN
mappings to FOAF, etc. This would then let, next year, a full-scale
Working Group fast-track a W3C Rec. out of whatever DataPortability.org
(if compatible with the Royalty-Free policy) and the SemWeb community
produces (it's hard to see other options for merging and querying data
besides RDF and SPARQL) if DataPortability.org wants this.