WIP: Ontology Namespaces

[MichaelHirn]

Summarizing the discussion @hobofan and I have had regarding namespaces in ontologies.

In RDF we have something like rdf:string and schema:string, where different ontologies - rdf and schema in this example - can have the same ontological entity (schema) name - in this case string. Important to note is, that although they share the same entity name they may differ semantically (and rdf:string can mean something else than a schema:string).

The namespace allows developers and users of these ontologies to use multiple ontologies in their application, without fearing any name-clashes, esentially giving guarantees of resolvability via a human-understandable ID and not only via the CID.

Presently, rlay does not support any namespace capabilities and it is up to the application developer/ontology user to ensure that different ontologies (or their own ontology) does not clash. The way this can be ensured right now, is by taking the namespace into the name of the ontological entity, e.g. StringRDF or StringSchema.

However, this makes sharing ontologies difficult, because of the implied naming convention. Also, this does not make nameclashes impossible either.

Proposed solutions are referring to npm, Annotations, and more or less rlay custom annotations to introduce namespaces. Namespaces are closely related to sharing and importing ontology packages, so it might make sense to combine multiple strategies to achieve this.

However, no clear winner emerged in the last discussion, which is why we created this issue, to collect thoughts and allow to refresh our memories on the subject.