RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people "The RELATIONSHIP list should make it obvious that explicit linguistic clarity in human relations is a pipe dream. It probably won't though the madness of the age is to assume that people can spell out, in explicit detail, the messiest aspects of their lives, and that they will eagerly do so, in order to provide better inputs to cool new software."
From the comments: "I have been lurking around the FOAF list for a while and know these guys have been at it for a long while. The questions raised by Clay have been brought up and debated to death...here comes a reputable guy, who probably has not been involved in the effort, who without really knowing the issues, "fires a rocket at it". This rocket causes a lot of waste of energy because it is just a basic instinct kind of a rocket. Not really thought through."
Clay Shirky on RELATIONSHIP "...he still managed to overlook the raison d'etre for the relationship. Indeed it's the raison d'etre for all vocabularies."
Most of the other comments are humorous and worth a read. Another case of the metadata being more interesting and thought provoking than the data.
