But RDF was pretty good with that, because it didn't force records into hierarchies. You could just define relationships, and then create them freely between records. Some people created heavy ontologies, but it wasn't a result of the data model.
Right, but the whole dream of the "semantic web" to me was that one website could discuss red wines, and another website could discuss Vietnamese food, and then a reader could use the semantic vocabulary shared between the two sites to arbitrarily ask questions such as "what wine will go best with this dish?"
If you just have a vocabulary where everyone can freely define concepts and their relationships in a fuzzy way this original goal will never be tractable- There needs to be some sort of unambiguous shared concept space between disparate sites (which in my estimation appears to not be achievable in any practical sense, due to the difficulty in finding "one true way" to build ontologies.)
Right, the vocabularies were supposed to be reused as much as possible, but that doesn't require heavy hierarchies, just that they were available. A single record could have facts/relationships defined by any number of ontologies, so they didn't have to be all-encompassing either.
Also, I think there were ways to "map" different ontologies, thought I never really explored that.
