Ok back to my normal musings on life the web and everything ;)
Thanks Douglas Adams
Well I have been trying to figure out why RDF and all of the other acronyms for the semantic web have not become household words and my answer is that it takes way too long to understand the technology. And once you think that you understand it a curve ball gets thrown to you and changes everything. So I havefound a simpler solution in the form of a different way to do the same thing instead of trying to define all of the relationships your data will have on the fly (like RDF and OWL do) set up a system to limit your vocabulary. I settled on WordNet which is basically an electronic dictionary / thesaurus and encyclopidia all in a C# wrapped API (the API needs some work but it does do what it is supposed to). How I plan to use wordnet is simple let the dictionary define my limited vocabulary (if it is not in the dictionary tough:); then using wordnets Holonym and hypernym trees define relationships between related words going either more abstract (holonym) or more specific hypernym. By using these basic relationships I can make sure the data always stays in some form of context; because I tag the data with the right context just as the data enters my application. So I can always pull out it and its relatives just with the context tag making RDBMs searches that much more specific.
Until next time,
Blair