🔗 HN Comment by IanCal in a discussion about RDF (emphasis added):

Someone will suggest modelling to solve this but here lies the biggest problem: The correct modelling depends on the questions you want to answer. Our modelling had good tradeoffs for mapping academic citation tracking. It had bad modelling for legal ownership. There isn’t one modelling that solves both well.

That may be why I was turned off by RDF all those years ago. One seeks to model a domain, but domains can be extremely complicated, and even if you cover everything, it’s still only one domain. But the biggest crime is assuming that the model is necessary for all use cases. And it just isn’t. Does every website that tracks books need to know the full legal name, publisher name, the legal entity of the company that supplied the typesetting? Simplify, man.

Via: Simon Willison

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