schema.org and libraries

Hi everyone,

I guess many of you already know that Google, Bing and Yahoo announced http://schema.org/ - a kind of "Ueberschema" for structured data on the Web. I have been following this mailing list for a while and was wondering that this - I would say quite relevant development - has not been discussed yet. I am just curious to hear what library people think about it so I formulated some questions that came into my mind:

1.) Should libraries start describing their objects using the schema.org vocabulary or can they safely ignore that development?

2.) Many libraries already expose their data as Linked Data. Is it necessary to align these developments with schema.org?

3.) Are there already any plans of using the schema.org extension mechanism (http://schema.org/docs/extension.html) for library vocabularies?

4.) schema.org seems to follow so kind of "evolutionary" schema development approach: "Extensions that gain significant adoption on the web may be moved into the core schema.org vocabulary, so that search engines can provide more functionality based on better understanding of the structured data." If schema.org is relevant for libraries, how does this affect current and future developments of library vocabularies such as FRBR, RDA, etc.?

I would be happy to hear opinions on that. I will try to summarize them later...

Thanks,

Bernhard

_____________________

Bernhard Haslhofer
Postdoctoral Associate
Cornell Information Science

301 College Ave. 
Ithaca, NY 14850

Phone: +1-607-379-0831
Skype: bernhard.haslhofer

Received on Wednesday, 8 June 2011 17:19:23 UTC