[doap-interest] How many projects per file?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 06:13:25PM -0500, Dan Brickley wrote:
> * Lyle Johnson <lyle.johnson at gmail.com> [2005-02-08 17:08-0600]
> > I suppose that technically nothing prevents it, but is it bad form to
> > include more than one project's description in a single DOAP file?
> 
> Reminds me of classic issues that crop up in FOAF land...
> 
> People naturally think of FOAF as a document format, when
> really it is a set of terms that can be used in lots of different
> (RDF-based) doc formats. Some of which might be focussed on 
> describing a single entity (person, in FOAF case).

I think the major difference lies in the way that DOAP is defined: it is 
defined as a document format, in the same way that RSS 1.* are, rather 
than just RDF Ontologies.

So, to use the DOAP Document format, it means you have:

<Project xmlns="&doapns;">
  ...
</Project>

-- in other words, just one project in the file (I'm pretty sure, 
although I suppose you could have sub projects that are related, or I 
misunderstand the "not using rdf:RDF as root element" aspect of RDF.)

However, the FOAF namespace can be used to describe projects in a way 
that RDF aware tools would likely be able to understand, and then you 
could describe as many as you wanted in one file: to an RDF tool:

<rdf:RDF ...>
  <Project>
    <name></name>
  </Project>
</rdf:RDF>

is the same as:

<Project ...>
  <name></name>
</Project>

So, the real question is what tools you want your data to work with.
If you're dealing in RDF, you can probably safely include multiple 
Projects in one file, but if you're dealing with DOAP-specific tools
(do any even exist?) you may run into problems. 

This is just my thoughts, and may be wrong.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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