No need to make our own: these techologies are stable and ready to use (Was: Re: IVOA Vocabularies - WD

[Brian Thomas]

On Thursday 06 September 2007 3:23:48 pm Doug Tody wrote:
> One should also keep in mind that we might want to read this information
> into astronomy client applications which just want the basic vocabulary,
> do not need advanced inference capabilities, etc., and do not want to
> be dependent upon some complex semantic web technology.

Well, RDF/OWL is simply a format for capturing the information. NO inference
going on there. Jena, Protege, etc may be used to read in this information to a 
program (and you dont have to specify any reasoning engine).

Personally, I think RDF and OWL are fairly mature as these things go, and not 
'fly-by-night' technology, Both RDF and OWL are a W3C recommendations!! 
Take a look at how long the spec for these have been around: 

http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/ (present spec, but first working draft in 2002)

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/ (present spec, but first working draft back in 2001)


=-brian