This is a bit of a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend quote, but since it’s semantic web related, I guess FOAFesque quoting is allowable. Danny Ayers just commented on Phil Wilson’s comment regarding Nick Lothian’s comment that “Every time anyone dares to question RDF the RDFites assume they don’t know how it works.”

What this suggests to me is that in the world of open-source software, a world where everything is free, it’s not necessarily the technology that is most important: instead, the community is key.

Perhaps this perceived fractiousness of the RDF community is a result of it’s origin – we’ve become accustomed to proclaiming it’s capabilities and have evolved scripts that work well among those we talk with often, but if questions are asked that don’t fit in with the specific keywords that cue up those scripts, then it’s easy to assume complete ignorance on the part of the questioner. This kind of semantic misunderstanding, is something we should know all about… or at least be able to model.