Dan Connolly announced that the W3C is considering the charter of an XML-URI working group, and provided a preliminary proposal.

The proposal is prefaced with the following disclaimer:

Note that public discussion of activity proposals is non-traditional, though not prohibited by W3C process. The traditional reason for keeping draft proposals confidential is that we want the membership to be free to give frank feedback on activity proposals, and prior public discussion of a proposal may result in suppression of dissenting views. However, this issue has already had sufficient public exposure that we estimate that public discussion of this proposal is not likely to burden the membership any further.

The proposal seeks the creation of an XML-URI Activity in the W3C Architecture Domain, consisting of an XML-URI Working Group. The proposal states that the discussions of the working group would be available to the public and the goals of the group would include the following:

• Determine the meaning of an XML document (Both data-oriented and human-target documents should be considered, including protocol messages).
• Answer the question of what a namespace is.
• Determine what is used to identify a namespace.
• Justify the need for URI schemes by raising awareness of requirements but not the definition of such schemes.
• Author proposals for new specifications to qualify or clarify or if necessary substantially change the Namespaces in XML specification.
• Specify requirements for RDF vocabulary for metadata to enable practical processing of XML (in on or offline environments)

Discussion of the proposal will occur on the XML-URI mailing list, which has been home to much of the recent discussion that has led up to this push to provide a formal W3C forum for resolving namespace related issues.

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