[rdfweb-dev] Re: Bartering

[Dan Brickley]

* Bill Kearney <wkearney99 at h...> [2002-12-01 14:42-0500]
> > it strikes me that the foafAuction variant of foafShop would be a good
> > (and not too difficult project) to set up. it incorporates all of the
> > foafShop ideas with regard to matching buyers and sellers as well as
> > having an explicit way for developing trust.
> 
> I greatly dislike the idea of grafting this into the foaf namespace. At what
> point will we have foaf:kitchenSink? It's a fine case for developing another
> schema and a use case for it's application in foaf.

Um, we already have foaf:dnaChecksum, this is (intentionally) not intended to 
be the last word in carefully scoped ontology design. The main thing is to 
get the technology out there, and get some experience with it. Sometimes anothernamespace makes sense (eg. foafcorp, trust); other times I'm very happy to 
just add things to FOAF and get on with other tasks. Something I've found a 
practical pain with RDF is remembering which namespace something comes from, 
even between RDF: and RDFS: after 5 years it's hard to remember. So that's one 
reason why I'm happy with FOAF's namespace having some oddball contents. 

Another anology is Guha and Rob McCool's TAP namespace, or Wordnet for that 
matter, both of which probably have a notion of 'kitchen sink'...

So yeah, a lot of the 'does it belong in FOAF' decision comes down to 
editorial instinct and pragmatism. We'll certainly go beyond 'stuff to do with 
friends and people'; how much farther we go within that namespace isn't clear 
yet. But that's imho OK, so long as we concentrate on documenting what we have 
done and presenting it with more clarity than we've managed to date...

Dan