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JSON-LD CG

Minutes for 2025-08-21

Present
Anatoly Scherbakov, Niklas Lindström, Benjamin Young, Gregg Kellogg, Wesley Smith, Ted Thibodeau Jr.
Chair(s)
Benjamin Young
Scribe(s)
Gregg Kellogg, Wesley Smith
Agenda
https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/22c91c62-1c3f-4154-9a9f-da15c38f3b2f/
Topics
  1. Announcements and Introductions
  2. CBOR-LD
  3. JSON-LD Rechartering
  4. Open Discussion
Gregg Kellogg is scribing.

Topic: Announcements and Introductions

Wesley Smith is scribing.
Wesley Smith: I
... I'm here because of CBOR-LD, and the consensus reaction has been a bit disconnected.
... I plan to attend WG/CG meetings more regularly.
Gregg Kellogg: I will be stepping back from responsibilities in this group for personal reasons
Benjamin Young: Agenda+
Benjamin Young: CBOR-LD

Topic: CBOR-LD

... there was concern shared that the group is unprepared for CBORLD to be a major deliverable in the charter
... as it is underrepresented by its authors
... I think it would be good for the group to level set on what we feel would be needed for us to have group weight behind the CBORLD specification
... and how to move that forward practically as part of the charter, which we are hoping to ship to get reviewed by the end of this month
... and whether CBOR-LD is in or out is an essential question
Wesley Smith: I'm happy to do any number of things; I can re-hash motivation and rationale if the group would like that
... We can go more into depth if people would like.
... I'm an editor/author and core developer on the work.
... Please give me suggestions.
Gregg Kellogg: The work on CBORLD has been happening outside this group, and we don't have buy-in or ownership, the work hasn't been done as part of the normal process
... would be worthwhile spending some time going through the design choices, but with the objective that when the spec comes out it's a product of the working group
Wesley Smith: That makes sense. I have done a lot of the work outside of the WG, mostly because of the need for rapid itteration.
... Sounds like you'd like to move to more of a GitHub flow.
... I can also give a brief state of the technology talk.
... I can also migrate some of the work into a form the group can work with.
Benjamin Young: I believe that's exactly what needs to happen. The spec should change on "main" and PRs shouldn't make their way without group discussion.
... It has acted as a Member Submission, which is treated as differently than a community group.
... We need to take this up with PA/Ivan.
Gregg Kellogg: Work in the CG is done more based upon the IP commitments that people make to be part of it, but in a member submission the IP is handed over as part of that submission
... I don't know much about the member submission route, but the document is listed as a community group product
Benjamin Young: +1
... it needs to become a product of the community group, using some of the steps that wes-smith outlined - that doesn't need to be a rigid change to GitHub, we can use this meeting for those types of discussions too
... but we do need to have control over what goes into the published version
Wesley Smith: About timelines: I hear the next couple of weeks tossed around, probably due to the charter.
... Let's not skip over things due to my lack of experience working in the process.
Benjamin Young: We're aiming to get the charter done by the end of the month, with the objective that it starts going through the W3C gears.
... This will set us up to introduce successfully at TPAC.
... By TPAC, we should be focusing on getting the house in order and getting to work with new momentum.
... I don't know what's needed right now about what this group can do over the next couple of weeks
... This means using the PR process with adequate time for group review before merger.
... It needs to move from being a DB piece of work to a W3C piece of work.
Wesley Smith: So, in the next couple of weeks, we need to get group consensus on the direction of the spec
... Of course, the meetings need to address things other than CBOR-LD, so people should feel free to reach out to me directly.
Gregg Kellogg: If you go to the group page, you can see a list of participants, and you can get emails by looking at that
... I do not think that we need to have a final report for CBORLD before the charter is finished
... I think there is sufficient progress, and the group will continue make progress, so I wouldn't use that as a formal deadline
... I don't think we should rush things, and I don't believe that the result of this review will be to change anything
... although I have said that CBORLD needs to address algorithmic entry points similarly to how yaml-ld works, or constrain its use
... in JSONLD we created an abstract representation for information, and algorithms work over that representation
... and then it is serialized into the appropriate base format
... that works for YAML, JSON, it should work for CBOR
... we should be explicit on where CBOR is not expected to be used
... it is possible to create a context in YAML-LD, it probably is not appropriate to create a context in CBOR-LD
Niklas Lindström: I agree.
Benjamin Young: That does sound like it would bring things in line with YAML-LD, which I think is the objective
Gregg Kellogg: We did discuss that maybe CBOR-LD is not a full linked data format, maybe it is a compression format wrapped in a CBOR encoding
Benjamin Young: What are the key things that YAML-LD has that CBOR-LD lacks?
Gregg Kellogg: As a full spec CBOR-LD needs to relate to more JSON-LD algorithms
... not difficult to add this to CBOR-LD
Wesley Smith: I agree that we should take lessons from YAML-LD.
... Look forward to getting more into that.
Benjamin Young: A lot of the framing for this new charter is to see JSON-LD as the progenitor of an ecosystem of LD languages
... and YAML-LD is the forerunner of that

Topic: JSON-LD Rechartering

https://github.com/json-ld/json-ld-wg-charter/issues/2 -> Issue 2 Update "Out of Scope" section. (by BigBlueHat)
Benjamin Young: We are going to put the current charter to a vote in the next week or so after some small changes
... and then work to get CBORLD to a community report status
... and work with staff contacts to get the charter into the bigger voting space
... once this group has done the formal voting on our side
Gregg Kellogg: Perhaps people have seen that there is a new W3C process document that includes changes to some aspects of chartering
... we should be looking at that to see if we need to adjust the charter as a result
Benjamin Young: We should go over the charter, I agree
Benjamin Young: I will take an action to review that to see at what level it might affect anything that is in the charter now
... and we will get the charter as stable as we can by the call next week, then work with PA/Ivan on what are the remaining practical actions
... we will try for an asynchronous vote on the charter
Gregg Kellogg: We can just use a PR for collecting votes
Benjamin Young: There will be some behind the scenes actions, an asynchronous vote, and hopefully we will have this out in the next week and a half
... the review by W3C membership will undoubtedly give us more to do

Topic: Open Discussion

... anyone have any remaining thoughts
... if not, thanks everyone for being here
Gregg Kellogg: For minutes, minutes.json-ld.org is a fairly straightforward process, scripts run to generate the minutes and you push the updates up
... that minuting is an item that someone will need to take over
... I will do a PR so people can see what goes into the minutes
... there is also a README in the repository that describes the process