One thing about writing RDF vocabularies that occurred to me listening to people talk at VoCamps (Oxford and Galway), is that typically what you are trying to do isn’t defining new terms, it’s modeling data, and at some stage in the modeling you discover you need to write a new vocabulary. Vocabulary authors often want to describe how their terms can best be used with existing complimentary vocabularies, like FOAF and Dublin Core, but the only commonly practiced way of doing so is to put it in human-readable form in the documentation annotations. In voiD, we wrote a guide, principally because we wanted to describe how the terms ought to be used together with existing vocabulary terms.

In tandem with this thought, when sketching out vocabularies myself, I tend not to start out by defining Classes and Properties, which is both tediously repetitive, and a step removed from the data-modeling (which is what I’m actually trying to do in the first place). Instead, I define a prefix for a new namespace, and pretend a vocabulary already exists at it. Probably quite a lot of people do this. I think of them as “pretend schemas“; I’ve heard ldodds call them “just in time schemas” (only bother to write it when someone actually asks to see it).

So last night I coded up Vocabify, which you can feed some instance data that uses your “just in time vocabulary“, tell it which namespace URI is the pretend one, and it will generate a schema from the instance data, which you can then edit and publish.

The classes and properties are also linked to the instances they are generated from with ov:exampleResource, so it is clear to readers how they can be used together with other properties.