- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 05:54:06 +0000 (UTC)
On Tue, 5 May 2009, Ben Adida wrote: > Ian Hickson wrote: > > Are you saying that RDF vocabularies can be created _without_ this due > > diligence? > > Who decides what the right due diligence is? The person writing the vocabulary, presumably. > One organization for *all* topics, ever? I don't think that would really scale. Even for major languages, like HTML, we haven't found a single organisation to be a successful model. Manu's list didn't mention anything about a single organisation: On Tue, 5 May 2009, Manu Sporny wrote: > > Creating a Microformat is a very time consuming prospect, including: > > 1. Attempting to apply current Microformats to solve your problem. > 2. Gathering examples to show how the content is represented in the > wild. > 3. Gathering common data formats that encode the sort of content > you are attempting to express. > 4. Analyzing the data formats and the content. > 5. Deriving common vocabulary terms. > 6. Proposing a draft Microformat and arguing the relevance of each > term in the vocabulary. > 7. Sorting out parsing rules for the Microformat. > 8. Repeating steps 1-7 until the community is happy. > 9. Testing the Microformat in the wild, getting feedback, writing > code to support your specific Microformat. > 10. Draft stage - if you didn't give up by this point. Surely all of the above apply equally to any RDFa vocabulary just as it would to _any_ vocabularly, regardless of the underlying syntax? Consider each of these in turn: 1: You have to make sure you're not reinventing the wheel, whatever language or vocabulary you are designing. 2: You have to make sure whatever language or vocabulary you are designing is something that your users can use. 3: If you do have to invent a new language or vocabulary, it makes sense to base it on the base of knowledge humanity has collected on the subject. 4: You have to study the information collected in steps 2 and 3 to make sense of it. 5: Deriving vocabulary names is a key part of any language design effort. 6: Justifying your design is a key part of any language design effort also. Not doing this would lead to a language or vocabulary with unnecessary parts, making it harder to use. 7: With any language, part of designing the vocabulary is defining how to process content that uses it. 8: Defining any language or vocabulary effectively must, clearly, involve a feedback loop with community review. 9: The most important practical test of a language is the test of deployment. Getting feedback and writing code is naturally part of writing a format. 10: You have to specify the language. As far as I can tell, the steps above are just the steps one would take for designing any format, language, or vocabulary. Are you saying that creating an RDF vocabulary _doesn't_ involve these steps? How is an RDF vocabulary defined if not using these steps? -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 5 May 2009 22:54:06 UTC