OK, Simon (in particular), I’ve filled out the OWL schema so it is now
pretty much complete. I decided to add everything in its own
namespace, though we may want to scale that back. My Agent and
subclasses could, for example, substitute FOAF, the new Contribution
class and properties might be better as a standalone schema, etc. There
are other examples like that.
But it seems to me the model is critical, and that’s what needs
battle-testing now. I suspect, for example, the classes may need
expanding (though that can happen incrementally).
The decision of the namespaces comes down to finding a good balance
between playing nice by RDF standards, but being easy-to-use for
developers who couldn’t care less about RDF. On the first part, I have
referenced directly other important schemas (FOAF, vCard, FRBR, DC)
where ever sensible. So an RDF reasoning tool, for example, would know
that my Person class is the same as foaf:Person.
BTW, I’ve been talking to people in the RDF world about updating the
vCard stuff at the W3C using Norm Walsh’s nice and updated version, and
harmonizing FOAF’s personal name model with it. There’s interest in
this, but it just may take some time. So I’ve kind of merged the models
myself here.
Bruce