In the course of playing with the skunkworks project and parsing existing webpages, I reluctantly broke down and did some more learning on RDF. And stumbled into the standards I had somehow overlooked before and OH LOOK there’s an ontology that does what I need better than schema.org (with its very Google-y assumptions that you only need one-way links because of course you’ve already spidered everything and built your searchable database). And it’s over ten years old. Some of the discussion of it has already link-rotted - the author’s blog’s most recent entry invites discussion on a Google Wave. The core of it is alive and well, though.

Jumping on the bandwagon of a standard that old seems maybe counter-intuitive, but I think of it as going back to the point where everyone excitedly said, “Yes, all piling into the Facebook silo is a wonderful idea,” and taking the other option at that fork.

Eh, it’s worth a try anyway.