Re: [TEI-ontology-SIG] Ontologies and Anglo-Saxon England

[Stuart A. Y. <sy...@gm...>]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 4:58 AM, Daniel Paul
O'Donnell<dan...@gm...> wrote:
> Obviously, in comparison to this group I have yet to put aside my
> childish things, but if anybody knows of anybody or any project that
> might find it useful to know about this, please let me know:

Our experiences with ontologies have led us to look at migrating (in
the long term) from our currently topic-maps approach to one based on
RDF and related technologies. While I hesitate to call our use of
topic maps a mistake (we had no way to determine how the technologies
would play out, CIDOC-CRM went with topic maps, etc), I would strongly
advise you against going down the topic maps route today.

There are three main reasons for this:

Firstly the amount of development work in the RDF community is at
least two orders of magnitude larger than the topic maps community.
There are many more tools for many more purposes and the tools are
being developed/matured significantly faster.

Secondly the RDF community takes an explicitly standards-based
approach, show a reluctance to redevelop things when standards can be
re-purposed (mime-types, language codes, dublin core, vcard, etc)

Thirdly vicarious interoperability seems to work in RDF and not in the
topic maps community (by that I mean the ability to interoperate
between independent data-sets).

Yes, I realise that this is not directly related to your Anglo-Saxon content...

cheers
stuart