{Disarmed} Re: Schema.org in RDF ...

All in all, if we can write a library which can read a page with 
schema.org data encoded and spit out RDF, who cares?

I'm looking the examples, and it looks easy enough to turn into triples, 
albeit there will often be graphs with nothing but bnodes.

There's no way normal web developers will assign URIs to things until 
they see the benefit... Could we suggest a trivial extension to 
schema.org to let people add URIs for itemtypes.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization" 
about="http://totl.net/#org">

If I had more hack-slack I'd knock up a library which takes a schema.org 
encoded page and spits out triples.

Are people going to create some semantic abominations using schema.org? 
of course, but they were already able to do that in RDFa. This is going 
to be used by the same kind of people who were implementing RSS a decade 
ago. Just accept that the world is going to end up with a big pile of 
shonky data!

schema.org is so very much more human-readable than RDFa. It wins hands 
down on that.

We're the linked data community. RDF is a tool to an end, no more. 
Rather than sit around and feel glum about this coming wave of data 
being a bit wrong, we should be looking at how to help it become Linked 
(and Open).

I think we made a big mistake in using http URIs. It's too confusing. If 
we'd used <thing://totl.net/> with the convention that you can find 
facts about it by converting "thing:" to "http:" then the world would be 
much less confused about URIs. I know this is probably an old topic of 
conversation, but it's a massive impediment to the public understanding 
of URIs for things not available via the HTTP protocol.

I'm amazed that people are so surprised about schema.org. Don't you 
realise that RDFa, RDF/XML and using http:// URIs for real world things 
is really really confusing and make the amazingly useful idea of Linked 
Open Data much harder to get to groups with?

These days when I teach people about RDF data I start with N-Triples as 
it's the easiest format to grok.

Sorry for getting a bit ranty, but this community has no focus on 
lowering the barriers which make it hard for the mainstream web 
community to start producing linked data. I find that very very frustrating.

Harry Halpin wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Michael Hausenblas
> <michael.hausenblas@deri.org> wrote:
>   
>> All,
>>
>> Thanks a lot for the comments we received so far, both here and (even more)
>> off-list. Now, to make our life a bit easier, may I ask you to provide
>> suggestions concerning the mapping (or feature requests alike) directly to
>> the Github [1]? Of course, if you're more into it, feel free to clone the
>> repo and issue a pull request.
>>
>> As you can imagine, this is a community endeavour - we just happened to kick
>> it off ;)
>>     
>
> Actually, I'm also going to point out that the W3C asked for EU
> funding about a year ago for something *very* similar  - and at the
> time had the interest even of Google - for hosting a RDF version of
> something quite similar to schema.org. But thanks to the wonderful
> judgement of the reviewers of EU proposals and the Semantic Web
> academic community, we weren't given funding :)
>
> Obviously Google and friends see a good opportunity here to actually
> make a place to find structured data vocabularies on the Web. While I
> wish they had better support for RDFa, I can see that the whole
> RDFa/microdata/microformats lack of convergence is causing a confusing
> mess for ordinary webmasters.
>
>                        cheers,
>                             harry
>   
>> Cheers,
>>        Michael
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/mhausenblas/schema-org-rdf/issues
>>
>> --
>> Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Research Fellow
>> LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
>> DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
>> NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
>> Ireland, Europe
>> Tel. +353 91 495730
>> http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
>> http://sw-app.org/about.html
>>
>> On 3 Jun 2011, at 22:06, Michael Hausenblas wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> http://schema.rdfs.org
>>>
>>> ... is now available - we're sorry for the delay ;)
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>        Michael
>>> --
>>> Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Research Fellow
>>> LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
>>> DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
>>> NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
>>> Ireland, Europe
>>> Tel. +353 91 495730
>>> http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
>>> http://sw-app.org/about.html
>>>
>>>       
>>
>>     
>
>   

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/