Re: [DataGov-DEV] Updated Microdata to RDF Working Draft

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> wrote:

> I know I might be missing some context here, but the statement that
> HTML Microdata is an evolutionary dead end is very strong, and in fact
> I strongly disagree with it. Compared with RDFa, Microdata represents
> a vastly simplified processing model for consumers of metadata we find
> in HTML on the Web. It also lacks a lot of the confusing baggage that
> comes along with semantic web technologies. This simplicity comes at a
> price of course in the form of lack of expressiveness, and a clear
> path to using existing RDF driven vocabularies. I say this as a member
> of the Semantic Web Deployment group (which no longer exists), which
> had a hand in creating the RDFa standard, and as a publisher of
> hundreds of thousands of RDFa documents at the Library of Congress
> [1].
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone on this
> discussion list is in a place to be able to officially say that the US
> Government should be using RDFa v1.1 over Microdata. Currently all the
> schema.org examples use Microdata, and I've seen statements from
> data.gov about their interest in supporting the use of schema.org [1].
> The thread above made it sound like schema.org partners (Google, Bing,
> etc) have made a commitment to parse RDFa. I know there has been some
> anecdotal evidence [2] that this is the case, but has anyone said
> anything official yet?
>

There was an announcement on the schema.org blog a few months ago [4]. See
also the pre-announcement as the RDFa WG was making alignments for
schema.org [5]. And more recently with the launch of GoodRelations on
schema.org [6]: "Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary is
directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5
Microdata and RDFa".

Last month during their schema.org update session at ISWC [7], Peter Mika
(Yahoo!) and Alexander Shubin (Yandex) promised some RDFa examples on
schema.org as part of the upcoming improvements to the schema.orginfrastructure.

Steph.

[4] http://blog.schema.org/2012/06/semtech-rdfa-microdata-and-more.html
[5] http://blog.schema.org/2011/11/using-rdfa-11-lite-with-schemaorg.html
[6] http://blog.schema.org/2012/11/good-relations-and-schemaorg.html
[7] http://www.slideshare.net/AlexShubin1/schemaorg-iswc2012-15283142/17