Undeclared vocabularies RE: Some questions

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Victor Lindesay wrote:

>Chaals again:
>> seriously, there are lists of vocabularies around, but it is
>> known that a lot
>> of vocabularies are creaeted by people without ever being so
>> much as a schema
>> labelling terms in the vocabulary - let alone listed anywhere.
>
>?

Sorry, this was a bit cryptic.

People often use terms as a vocabulary, without really defining the
vocabulary anywhere. I did it most recently in
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/200305/axforms/earlinst.rdf where I use a
vocabulary for describing the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Although there is no schema for that vocabulary, I can explain how it works,
what the terms are, and could write a schema for it.

Other people copy terms out of this vocabulary, since they think they
understand what it means (further evidence that it is at least comprehensible
:-).

I'm pretty sure other people have examples of this too.

The point is that these things can get quite a lot of use before anyone
notices that there isn't a schema, but it is very difficult for them to get
listed in directories like SchemaWeb.

Cheers

Chaals