RDF bad...

I met with a certain London university today and the topic of conversation steered ultimately towards RDF, a metadata standard for which they have little time. Why? Because the so-called 'controlled vocabularies' of RDF are often uncontrolled, flawed, messy and poorly-structured. They asked the questions: who is building them, what is their agenda, and can they be trusted? It recalled Cory Doctorow's irreverant but still-relevant metacrap rant from 2001. It's probably true that schemas will be built by specific communities to cater for their local needs. And it would be bad if this results in duplication and increased heterogeneity. But to counter that charge, 'schema orchestration' is coming along nicely, and automatic harvesting from existing documents will remove the element of doubt from current human-generated metadata.

Posted by monoman at 08:04 PM on July 14, 2004