Re: WG: Schema.org considered helpful

On 19 June 2011 11:44, Lukas Koster <l.koster@uva.nl> wrote:
> Just a few remarks:
>
> - The internet was created by the USA army
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History), the World Wide Web came out
> of the scientific/research world.

...btw the first Web browser, "World Wide Web" (later aka "Nexus") was
perfectly capable of displaying images (and movies, sounds etc), by
passing them on to the local operating system, NeXT. Mosaic's charm
was inline images and running on a more consumer-accessible OS.

> - As Rurik Greenall states: microformats are just another form of the
> obsolete "record" concept. In linked data it's about networked information

Oh, I disagree here! The idea of a record or document format will be
useful forever. RDF and Linked Data basically give us dictionaries of
terms (schemas/ontologies) but don't generally say anything about
kinds of documents. This has left a bit of a gap: it's very nice
having RDF vocab like 'shippingOrder', ... but in the XML tradition we
had something more: we could express our expectations for what useful
package of info we would find in any particular XML shipping order
document. I don't think this is obsolete, but rather something we'll
slowly rebuild on top of RDF, eg. DC's notion of application profile
is in this area.

And re 'microformats' and calling them 'obsolete' is not the nicest
way of building bridges with that community. There has been a lot of
pointlessly hostile 'microformats vs rdf' discussion over the last
several years, I hope we can move away from that and see things more
as explorations of different tradeoffs in design space. Many of the
features of RDFa 1.1, for example, address concerns repeatedly raised
by microformats and html5 people; and the design discussions around
microformats.org/wiki/microformats-2 likewise bring it closer to the
approach rdf takes. In this context throwing around language like
'obsolete' can do a lot more harm than good, in terms of the slow
drift towards consensus.

cheers,

Dan

ps. I've been calling z39.50 obsolete since mid-90s but it hasn't gone
away yet ;)

Received on Sunday, 19 June 2011 12:39:23 UTC