Re: Deprecate http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# in favour of /ns/rdf# ??

Hi everyone,

No surprise at the level of opposition to deprecating the namespaces
> (again, I point out in my defence that I raised it after someone asked
> me about it; as a stickler for persistence I'm happy with that outcome).
>
As we recently talked about it, it could be that Phil refers to me there so
feel free to blame me for the long mail thread ;-)

I fully agree with many of the points that forked out of the main proposal,
namely:
* Make it easier to find out if something is in rdf: or rdfs: (and
eventually why)
* Provide different serialisations
* Provide better multilingual support
This would make everyone's life easier. Now.

For the future I would still much advocate deprecating the old namespace
and start using the new one. If I could give only one motivation, it would
be that new vocabularies will be using the new namespace whereas the key
ones will still be using an old (and somewhat confusing) location. From the
outside this is not very consistent: several W3C vocabularies under
different locations with no clear common design pattern, usage of dates in
URI whereas most BP guides (rightly) say it is not a good idea, version of
the vocabularies different than what the URI suggest, ...

Furthermore, deprecating does not mean having to rewrite all the triples
that are out there, and all the hard-coded namespaces used in every
software. We can just set up redirects between the terms present in the old
namespace to the one in the new one with a note suggesting not to use the
old syntax any more. This may involve a bit more HTTP tips&tricks than just
serving an OWL file but I don't see any big technological difficulty there.
We can also keep this redirection until nobody uses the old namespaces any
more...

This will eventually happen as most of the RDF data out there is
automatically generated from some legacy formats. As the maintainers of
these datasets update their D2R/CSV2RDF/... scripts for using the new
namespaces the usage of the deprecated ones will progressively fade away.
Software also gets updated every now and then and new releases can safely
come with new parsing capabilities. There is only data and software that do
no see any update that will not switch to using the new namespaces... but
do we really want to build a Web of Data on outdated data and abandonware ?

Anyway, for the sake of clarity and end-user friendliness, I think we
should keep this deprecation idea in the air while starting to work on
content negotiation and multi-linguality.

Cheers,
Christophe

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