SKOS comment: change of namespace

Bernard Vatant just made me aware of the change of namespace of the SKOS vocabulary (from  http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# to http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos#).

I understand that there was a non-backward compatible evolution of the draft during the 4 last years, but I still want to express my bad feeling about this:

Such modification is a pain for implementers: all XSLT stylesheets or DBMS connectors have to be modified, endless discussions will arise between SKOS providers and SKOS readers (" you have an old SKOS", "which namespace do you have?").

I agree that changing a namespace is good policy when a standard evolves in a non-backward compatible way.
BUT:

a)      SKOS is still a draft, no a standardized vocabulary; SKOS has no version that would allow people to say "I have implemented *this* version"

b)      such non-backward compatible evolution should only be associated with a major versioning of a standard (e.g. from version 1.x to 2.0)

c)       the evolutions have touched side features, not core features, so most draft implementations were still usable ... until  the namespace was changed.

Best regards
Laurent Le Meur
AFP






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