Re: SKOS for schema.org proposal for discussion

Bernard, to provide a general answer to both of your questions
parenthetically prefaced "from a SEO point of view," I've yet to see any
evidence that any search engine has ever used any external URI provided in
schema.org markup in order to produce a rich snippet, change the ranking
order of web pages or return a resource in the SERPs based solely on such a
reference.

This doesn't mean that the search engines *aren't* ingesting and using
these data, only that there's no observed evidence that they're doing so.

(I don't know whether Martin Hepp or anyone else has observed a
demonstrable impact in the SERPs as a result of referencing
productontology.org URIs via additionalType - I'd certainly be interested
in hearing of such cases if they exist!)

But this lack of evidence is not unimportant from an SEO practitioner's
point of view, because as a result there's no incentive to employ such
mechanisms:  the demonstrated "added value" is zero.



On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Bernard Vatant
<bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>wrote:

> Let me make my point differently.
>
> Maybe this is obvious for all users of schema.org, please point me to the
> relevant resources if it's the case.
>
> I want to say that my content (page/section) is about "Sustainable
> agriculture".
>
> I have a skos:Concept for this, defined in a good reference vocabulary
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh87004216
>
> I can already use in the current state of affairs, the schema.org/aboutproperty to mark my page with this URI, right?
>
> Q1. What is the current added value (from a SEO point of view) to mark
> with this URI vs marking with the string "Sustainable agriculture"? And
> particularly what is the added value of having this URI being defined as a
> skos:Concept in a most authoritative Concept Scheme (LCSH), instead of any
> other URI such as
> http://dbpedia.org/page/Sustainable_agriculture
>
> http://www.actu-environnement.com/ae/dictionnaire_environnement/definition/agriculture_durable.php4
>
> Q2. What would be the added value (always from a SEO point of view) to add
> a schema.org type (whatever its name) to this URI indicating in the
> markup that this URI is indeed a skos:Concept belonging to a
> skos:ConceptScheme, namely LCSH (which you can discover by dereferencing
> the URI anyway, but do search engines follow their nose in the markup)?
>
> (Thinking about it I have the same question for the use of any reference
> URI, be it a skos:Concept or not. What do you gain if any by using
> http://id.insee.fr/geo/departement/05 instead of the string
> "Hautes-Alpes" in a schema.org/Place description?)
>
> Bernard
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> 2013/10/8 Vicki Tardif Holland <vtardif@google.com>
>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:41 AM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I actually read the discussion differently. It's not so much that people
>>> want to express topics in the KOS sense, but that they want to refer to
>>> controlled lists within their data, and SKOS covers that. SKOS gives you a
>>> way to define a finite list with a few useful relationships. I think it's
>>> the mechanism of SKOS that people are looking for, more than the KOS value.
>>>
>>
>> I had the same interpretation.
>>
>> I know that controlled vocabularies are sometimes seen as a nuisance
>> outside of the library realm, but they are useful in the cases where
>> programmers want an enumeration. SKOS is even better than a flat
>> enumeration, because the vocabulary can have a hierarchy, allowing for
>> inheritance.
>>
>> As an example, we have been working through a proposal to support civic
>> services in schema.org. One of the properties of a service is
>> "serviceType". It would be nice to be able to encourage people to use
>> something like openelegibility.org's taxonomy so that we have some hope
>> of sorting out the services automatically.
>>
>> - Vicki
>>
>>
>> Vicki Tardif Holland | Ontologist | vtardif@google.com
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *Bernard Vatant
> *
> Vocabularies & Data Engineering
> Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
> Skype : bernard.vatant
> Blog : the wheel and the hub <http://bvatant.blogspot.com>
> Linked Open Vocabularies : lov.okfn.org
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