Re: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

Thanks for your extensive response Martin (also to the other posts), I
think you just answered every question I could possible come up with. And I
also understand your line of thought with 'some' disambiguating is better
than none, as illustrated by:

{
        name: "Input Voltage"
        min: 110
        max: 250
        unitCode : "VLT"
}

To keep it simple: I like it!



On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 1:35 AM, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org <
martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> Hi Jason:
>
> I could live with having this at the position of http://schema.org/Product,
> and maybe gradually expanding the domain of additionalProperty to relevant
> other types on demand. Personally I think that having a generic extension
> mechanism at the level of http://schema.org/Thing is a bit more
> appealing, but I would not have a problem with starting at a deeper branch
> and then seing how it develops in the wild.
>
> Dan, Guha - do you have any opinion on this?
>
> Best
>
> Martin
>
> On 01 May 2014, at 01:28, Jason Douglas <jasondouglas@google.com> wrote:
>
> > If this is just for product specs, then why not propose the
> denormalization at that constrained level rather than as a global concept?
> >
> > I believe the sports working group was considering something similar for
> "sports statistic."
> >
> > -jason
> >
> > On Wed Apr 30 2014 at 4:04:35 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <
> pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 04/30/2014 01:43 PM, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org wrote:
> > > Peter:
> > > On 29 Apr 2014, at 15:47, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <
> pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> There appears to be quite a lot here. As far as I can tell, the
>  essence is to have a special property whose values are some sort of
> structure that represents some sort of pair of some sort of relationship
> and some sort of value.
> > > Yes. It is about providing a mechanism that allows site owners to
> expose core meta-data for their content, even if they cannot lift their
> data to a higher degree of formality.
> > >
> > >> The fly in this ointment is in all the "some sort"s above.
> > > This is a design feature, not a bug, same as ambiguity in human
> languages is often a feature, not a bug. We allow sites to speak in data
> even if they cannot speak Oxford English.
> >
> > I firmly believe that this *is* a bug.  I don't see any significant
> advantage
> > of this proposal over allowing the attachment of RDB-style tables to
> > entities.  Consumers will have to handle a wide variety of "columns" with
> > little or no commonality between information coming from different
> sources.
> >
> > Sure, if you have considerable resources, you may be able to make sense
> of the
> > heterogeneity, but I thought that the idea behind schema.org was to put
> some
> > homogeneity on information, i.e., precisely to move away from the
> difficult
> > aspects of human languages.
> > >
> > >> How are consumers of this information supposed to treat it? For
> example, what happens when there are multiple values, or the value doesn't
> fit within the min and max, or there are any number of situations that do
> not fit within the simplecases?
> > > They will have to post-process this "proto-data" and apply a lot of
> heuristics, machine learning, NLP to lift the raw data to the data they use
> for the final purpose. This is the very nature of processing data from Web
> markup at scale, see my post on "proto-data",
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2013Oct/0293.html.
> > >
> > > But if Web sites are able to expose the core meta-data for such data,
> like
> > >
> > > - the name of the propery
> > > - the value
> > > - the unit
> > > - some hint of a standard that defines this property
> > >
> > > this is already a huge improvement over the state of the art.
> >
> >
> > I just don't see the advantage here.  Maybe there will be commonalities,
> but
> > then surely the way forward is to put these commonalities into
> schema.org.
> >
> > >
> > >> There are several examples on the proposal page (look intervals and
> ranges) that don't fit within the simple cases, showing how easy it is to
> slip outside the simple cases.
> > >>
> > > With mark-up at Web scale, there is no black-and-white view of what is
> inside and outside the intended cases.
> >
> > Umm. I said "simple", not "intended".  The point here is that if even the
> > early examples slip into cases where the data values include non-formal
> > aspects, then the consumer processing is going to be very messy and
> error prone.
> > >
> > > As a side remark:
> > >
> > > I have spent the last ten years with building product ontologies in
> OWL DL that extend GoodRelations by classes and properties, in total more
> than 40 such ontologies, see
> http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Vocabularies, with 40,000
> classes and maybe 20,000 properties. They are perfect for a data consumer,
> and they are used in applications. However, we have not been able to
> convince site-owners at scale to use such vocabularies for mark-uping up
> their content. The main reason for that is that they have a very, very hard
> time lifting and cleansing their data to that level of formality.
> >
> > Then let's stick to scraping web pages.
> >
> > >
> > > Martin
> >
> >
> > peter
> >
> > >
> > >> peter
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> On 04/29/2014 02:42 AM, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org wrote:
> > >>> Dear all:
> > >>>
> > >>> I have just finalized a proposal on how to add support for generic
> property-value pairs to schema.org. This serves three purposes:
> > >>>
> > >>> 1. It will allow to expose product feature information from
> thousands of product detail pages from retailers and manufacturers.
> > >>> 2. It will simplify the development of future extensions for
> specific types of products and services, because we do no longer need to
> standardize and define all relevant properties in schema.org and can
> instead defer the interpretation to the client.
> > >>> 3. It will serve as a clean, generic extension mechanism for
> properties in schema.org
> > >>>
> > >>> The proposal with all examples is here:
> > >>>
> > >>>      https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/PropertyValuePairs
> > >>>
> > >>> Your feedback will be very welcome.
> > >>>
> > >>> Best wishes / Mit freundlichen Grüßen
> > >>>
> > >>> Martin Hepp
> > >>> -----------------------------------
> > >>> martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
> > >>> mhepp@computer.org          @mfhepp
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>
> >
> >
>
>
>