Danah Boyd has posted a thought-provoking criticism of the RELATIONSHIP ontology (by way of Marc Canter) While I approach this matter from a strongly technical perspective, the perspective she presents should be carefully considered as we define social software standards.

• Relationships are situated within a CONTEXT.
• Relationships are defined by CULTURE; their types are SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS.
• Relationships do not exist without POWER.

Source

My answer is that we will have to allow the semantics of relationships to emerge from the somewhat distorted political dynamics of the labeling process. Openly developing standards for the assignment of relationships surely is better than relying on online services to force standards through flat, html interfaces.

Categorical Context

At the very least, the surface sort of relationship context (i.e. defined by logical groups of relationships) must be incorporated into a relationship ontology. Beyond adding a new dimension of expressiveness, this would create a natural framework for participation. I can see all kinds of useful (and humorously useless) ontologies of relationships withing a certain category being maintained. RDF and OWL allow for contributions from whomever wishes to host one - what ends up being adopted is a different matter entirely.

Perspective

The context of perspective (i.e. defined by who may be viewing this information about your relationship) is something that must be customized by the person maintaining their own information. Identifying the viewer would allow more detailed access, or contextualized access, to the relationship resources.

Culture

As for the cultural aspect, this can be accomplished through subclassing of context, or through the definition of new contexts. Translation services might play a role in how this information may be understood by people of other cultures. Lets be friends in the American sense, or pen pals in the Japanese sense. Actually, lets just be friendster friends.

Power

The power dynamic aspect may be (somewhat badly) incorporated into a standard through guiding the formation of a relationship, especially those which may need to require some sort of verification. Ultimately, the complex power dynamics of relationships should be simply interpreted by the users. My favorite implementation of this notion: the "open marriage" designation.

With a more expressive ontology for defining relationships (certainly more so than RELATIONSHIP), we may actually end up with a better understanding of the social dynamics of the real world, across the world. In order to have a conversation, we need to agree on some conventions, so we can't complain too much about the RELATIONSHIP. :)