On 5/4/2010 9:54 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:

> BIBO, which many people seem to like, has almost 200 data
> elements and classes, and is greatly lacking in some areas (e.g. maps,
> music).

What makes BIBO useful, in my limited experience, is that it integrates 
commonly used ontologies like FOAF and DCTERMS.  Also, since it is an 
ontology for RDF description, you can supplement other vocabularies for 
specific cases that BIBO doesn't handle.  As Ross Singer just posted as 
I'm writing this:

On 5/4/2010 9:57 AM, Ross Singer wrote:
 > In RDF, you can pull in predicates from other namespaces, where the
 > attributes you're looking for may be defined. What's nice about this
 > is that works sort of like how namespaces are *supposed* to work in
 > XML:  that is, an agent that comes along and grabs your triples will
 > parse the assertions from vocabularies it understands and ignore those
 > it doesn't.

It's important that we don't look at BIBO or any other bibliographic 
ontology as an uber vocabulary.  One of the many elegant features of 
RDF, IMHO, is that each specialization can contribute their own 
vocabulary, e.g. general vocabularies like FOAF, DCTERMS, and BIBO can 
be refined by more domain specific vocabularies like the music 
ontology[1], or ontologies for describing archival collections, sheet 
music, maps...  In fact, having only 200 properties and classes gives 
BIBO an advantage:  it's easy to grok and plays nicely with other 
vocabularies, which could do the heavy lifting for specific resources.

I feel like it makes the most sense to let domain specialists create 
domain specific vocabularies rather than try to cover every conceivable 
situation in one vocabulary written by a centralized body.

One last thought...  BIBO in particular is developed by a community. 
There is an active listserv[2] and the project leads are very receptive 
to comment.  If there is something important missing, let's help them.

[1] http://musicontology.com/
[2] http://bibliontology.com/community

Aaron