Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>> We currently use topic maps, alot, in our infrastructure. If we were
>> starting again tomorrow, I'd advocate using RDF instead, mainly because of
>> the much better tool support and take-up.
> 
> Hmm, not a good thing at all. Could you elaborate, though, as I use it
> too as part of infrastructure too, and wouldn't touch RDF / SemWeb
> without a long stick? I'm into application semantics and shared
> knowledge-bases. What are you guys doing where you feel the support
> and tools are lacking? And what are the RDF alternatives?

RDF, unlike topic maps, is being used by substantial numbers of people 
who we interact with in the real world and would like to interoperate 
with. If we used RDF rather than topic maps internally, that 
interoperability would be much, much cheaper. It's tempting to say it's 
free, but it's not quite, because it does impose some constraints.

In my eyes, the core thing that RDF supports that topic maps don't seem 
to is seamless reuse by people you don't care about.

For example the people at http://lcsubjects.org have never heard of us 
(that I know of), but we can use their URLs like 
http://lcsubjects.org/subjects/sh90005545#concept to represent our roles.

cheers
stuart
-- 
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository