Re: TAP classes are strings, not classes

* Rob McCool <robm@robm.com> [2004-06-11 12:29-0700]
> > Is 
> > http://tap.stanford.edu/data/ the offial-est namespace URI you folks 
> > are deploying? Should it be OK to encourage folk to write RDF using this 
> > namespace and expect it to be dereference-able over the coming years...?
> 
> Yes, we're sprinkling it everywhere and it's going to be very hard to remove,
> so you should consider it dereferencable for a long time.

That's good to know
 
> I haven't updated the SDK or the KB downloads in a while, partially because
> there hasn't been much interest, and partially because it takes effort. Is
> there interest now? I suppose if I just update them that may create some
> interest.

I suppose there's an element of chicken and egg here. TAP project and
list seemed a bit quiet, so people don't play with it so much. And
people don't encourage you so you spend your cycles on other things.

For the record I'm a big TAP fan. IMHO the future of RDF interestingness
is very much at the instance-data level, rather than clever-clever
ontologies defined using detailed formal rules. Ontologies are all about
making sweeping generalisations about the world. I guess there's a role
for that, but the space between trivial/crass ("People and Documents are 
disjoint") and contentiously detailed ("all humans are Male or Female")
isn't a rich as some think. TAP appeals to me because it takes a 
very pragmatic approach, and does just enough of the generalities to
provide something to hang detailed instance data on. The reference by
description approach (http://tap.stanford.edu/tap/rbd.html etc) is 
much needed.  Both these aspects of TAP are common I think to the 
approach we've taken with FOAF, where the approach is also about getting
some actual data out there (in our case distributed and harvestable),
and about finding conventions for identifying things without appeal to
the 'everything has a URI and everyone knows it' fairytale.

So that's why I'm interested to plug TAP data and vocab into FOAF.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Friday, 11 June 2004 15:39:59 UTC