I’m currently working on the second major revision of TDL (the vocabulary that is, not the oft-revised documentation). Unlike the largely-unheralded first revision, this one uses a different namespace. In principle, this avoids compatibility problems for any hypothetical users of TDL 0.2, but I’m mostly doing it becuase the old URIs weren’t resolvable. I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that providing a description of a term at the term’s address, while not required, is convenient.
That being said, these are the major changes:
- Posts are no longer required to be texts, since there are audioblogs and photoblogs in the wild. I’m not sure how well they fit into the discussion threading concept, but there’s no reason to exclude them out of hand.
- Topics are defined a little more formally: they are an organizing princlple for Posts, and can be thought of as a pair of functions. The first tells you whether a Post belongs in the Topic, and second gives the posts an order. This means that the contents of a Topic may change over time (generally through growth), the Topic itself has a constant definition.
- Posts and Topics are now disjoint. With the clarified concept of what a Topic is, it no longer makes sense to think of something as being both a Post and a Topic.
- I’m now using OWL to define terms. This allows me to formally state that Posts and Topics are disjoint, for example, and that subtopicOf is transitive.
- The threading model is being simplified. The TDL 0.2 design had some cruft dating back to the original idea of extracting threading information from HTML.
There’s no documentation up at present, but I do have a draft copy of the TDL 0.3 schema available.