Re: schema.org and ONIX...

Wow, I see I have did strike some chord here:-) which is great.

On a very practical level: yes, I believe having a separate call discussing this would be good and useful. Like Bill, I am out this week; being at the WWW2014 conference in Seoul is obviously an obstacle (as an aside, I will speak about digital publishing this afternoon as well as on Friday on another local event, so continue doing my preaching:-). I will also have some days off around Easter week-end. When could we, roughly have a call? We could set up a doodle if we have some available periods: next week, the week after, both, neither?

I cannot judge the THEMA/ONIX issue, I leave this to you guys. My question is different, though. Where do ONIX data reside these days? As I said, if it is hidden in databases only, then it is invisible to Google, hence schema.org may be useless. Put it another way, is there enough pages on the Web, usually crawled by Google that does or may include ONIX data? I would certainly hope so, but we have to be sure (and you have to tell me...).

Another point worth knowing about. When schema.org came about, it was focused on HTML pages that use microdata syntax to add schema.org terms (RDFa Lite followed after a while). This is of course possible, but, for many sites, this was a bit awkward: systems may have that type of metadata in databases with the HTML pages generated automatically, and artificially adding microdata to the pages was an extra hassle. As a result, about a year ago, schema.org added the possibility to add JSON-LD into an HTML page using a special <script> tag. That made the life for such systems way easier and I suspect that this is also something that this industry may take an advantage of. (Schema.org has recently renewed their pages with examples in three syntaxes everywhere; eg, scroll to the bottom of [1].)

Finally, we have to realize one more thing. The work to be done is not 'simply' to convert a mini-ONIX into schema.org. The work is to harmonize this, whenever possible, with what is already in schema.org (see [1] below) and add the missing properties and classes or modify the description of existing ones. We should not underestimate the amount of work...

Cheers

Ivan


[1] http://schema.org/Book



On 09 Apr 2014, at 24:10 , Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com> wrote:

> Just going through the responses . . . and as for this one, regrettably, Luc, I will not be able to attend LBF this year. So if you've been looking for me, you can stop trying . . . ;-) but I would love to talk with you about this in any case. BTW I will have to miss the DPUB call next week.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: AUDRAIN LUC [mailto:LAUDRAIN@hachette-livre.fr] 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 4:12 AM
> To: Ivan Herman
> Cc: Bill Kasdorf; W3C Digital Publishing IG
> Subject: Re: schema.org and ONIX...
> 
> Hi Ivan and Bill,
> 
> That's a very good exercise and I will share thoughts with Bill at London Book Fair if possible. 
> I'm really interested as I'm wondering what it will bring for more ebooks discoverability on the Web beyond the ONIX feeds we provide already to distributors and digital bookstores. 
> 
> Best,
> Luc
> 
> 
>> Le 8 avr. 2014 à 05:24, "Ivan Herman" <ivan@w3.org> a écrit :
>> 
>> Bill,
>> 
>> I am currently at a Linked Data Workshop at a conference in Seoul, which had a keynote from R. Guha, who is, in some sense, the "father" of schema.org. Listening to him (combining also with my past experience), and also referring to the note I sent around earlier this morning[1] I am more and more serious in thinking that a stripped-down version of ONIX defined in schema.org might be a great idea. Of course, we have to see whether there is a business interest and business case for this: is there a use case for publishers as well as for search engines? But if the answer is yes on both, than this may be an important thing to do.
>> 
>> I do know Guha personally relatively well, as well as Dan Brickley, who is the other person running schema.org's vocabulary development. I would be happy to make the links and go into the discussions but, of course, the question is whether publishers, as well as institutions like Bowker, would be interested by something like that. I think that clarifying this, ie, set up the use cases, would be perfectly in line with the IG's charter (although we probably would have to spawn a different group to make the specification itself, but that is all right.)
>> 
>> What do you think?
>> 
>> Ivan
>> 
>> [1] http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/london-book-fair/article/61722-london-book-fair-2014-publishers-and-internet-standards.html
>> 
>> ----
>> Ivan Herman, W3C 
>> Digital Publishing Activity Lead
>> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
>> mobile: +31-641044153
>> GPG: 0x343F1A3D
>> FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
GPG: 0x343F1A3D
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf