Re: Advice on Referencing External Vocabularies

+1 to remaining agnostic

_____________________________________________________
Jacob Jett
Research Assistant
Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, MC-493, Champaign, IL 61820-6211 USA
(217) 244-2164
jjett2@illinois.edu

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 8:25 AM, Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>
wrote:

> While not pretending to have anywhere near the expertise on this as you or
> Danbri, I want to express a +1000 to his position. There are a multitude of
> vocabularies, and each one is important to some sector of publishing,
> communication, and information dissemination. I think it would be a huge
> mistake to try to pick one of them. IMO it is essential to remain agnostic
> on such things in the context of the Web. In fact, within specific domains,
> practitioners often find that even the most widely used vocabularies,
> including schema.org and both DCMES and DCTERMS, are insufficient for
> their particular domain-specific needs. Common framework (e.g, the abstract
> model), sure; agreed-upon syntaxes/serializations (note the plurals), okay,
> more than one but maybe not any old thing; common vocabulary, don't go
> there.
> --Bill Kasdorf
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Schepers [mailto:schepers@w3.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2015 2:12 AM
> To: W3C Public Annotation List; Dan Brickley
> Subject: Advice on Referencing External Vocabularies
>
> Hi, Dan–
>
> Thanks for the discussions at TPAC.
>
> (Context: Danbri is the coordinator for Schema.org, one of the
> contributors to Dublin Core, founder of FOAF, and a long-time SemWeb
> expert, experienced in both application development and in standards. I
> asked him over dinner what approach we should use in referencing external
> vocabularies for our terms.)
>
> If you'll recall, I asked you for advice on what vocabulary to reference,
> and relative influence and usage of `dc-term`s vs Schema.org.
>
> I was surprised by your answer… If I understood correctly, you suggested
> not using any one canonical external vocabulary in our spec, but rather to
> offer a set of equivalent vocabulary terms that might be used, depending on
> the project. On the one hand, this makes sense, and is a decentralized
> solution; on the other, it doesn't really reduce the complexity, as I'd
> hoped to do by referencing only a single external vocabulary. Could you
> explain the rationale there, or correct my misunderstanding?
>
> Also, I asked about patterns of usage in `dc-term`s and Schema.org. My
> understanding was that Schema.org had already overtaken the usage of Dublin
> Core in the wider Web (though perhaps not in older libraries), and that it
> would be easiest for future developers if we used Schema.org; TimBL
> suggested during our F2F that more projects, and thus more tools, natively
> understood Dublin Core today; ultimately, I guess we need to figure out the
> right balance (or, maybe not, if we follow your advice on including
> multiple references). I think you had a more nuanced answer on usage
> patterns, too. Can you speak to that as well?
>
> All your explanations made sense to me at the time, but not enough for me
> to convey facts and explain it to others in this WG… I appreciate your
> helping us sort out some long-standing (if not particularly
> contentious) issues.
>
> Thanks–
> –Doug
>
>
>
>