Namespace proliferation

[dbooth-boston]

It's hard to manage all the
namespaces involved in using RDF: FOAF, SKOS, DC and all the
hundreds of specialized namespaces that are encountered when
using external RDF. Namespaces can help organize IRIs into
categories (typically based on the IRI's origin), but this
fact is nowhere recognized in official RDF specs. Indeed,
the official mantra is that IRIs are opaque, and there are
very important design reasons for opacity.[16] But there is
a cost: RDF is stuck in a flat, global naming space analogous
to global variables of 1960's programming languages. Somehow,
modern programming languages deal with namespaces much more
conveniently than RDF does. Perhaps we can learn from them,
without undermining the Web's design principles.