Pierre Losson's blog has a post on Open data model: a need ! that links to the Asset Oriented Modeling (AOM) website and its KLEEN whitepaper (PDF), which all looks interesting.

(btw, I am experimenting with Pierre's pop2blog on David Czarnecki's recommendation.)

From the AOM site:

AOM is designed with these goals in mind:

• unified approach to entities and relationships (assets)
• support for higher order relationships
• support for complex data structures based on regular grammars
• namespaces and scopes

I will be reading this more, for ideas and inspirations. One of the ideas with the iCite net is that every iCite usually publishes its data schema, and iCite data schemas can be easily shared from one iCite to many others. Plus, with the automatic cross-referencing of iCites, it will be possible to query (in many cases) where there are iCites using a particular schema.

So, for example, if I create a "blog rating" attribute domain (e.g., datatype) that I use when I link to blogs from my blogroll iCite, the definition of that attribute is published and can be used by others. I can also find out who is using it, because their use of it will create a link from my schema definition back to their iCites.

That probably doesn't sound too exciting, but the idea is to make it really easy to create, share and mutate a little dumber (more primitive) version of what might be called "namespaces".