Re: Multiple itemtypes in microdata

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 1:30 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Oct 2011, Jeni Tennison wrote:
> >> One of the assumptions we're making within the HTML Data TF is that
> >> publishers will need to publish in multiple formats (rather than
> >> consumers understanding multiple formats)
> >
> > That sounds like a horrible authoring experience. :-)
>
> Yes, but see
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-data-tf/2011Oct/0024.html
>
> I don't expect multivocabulary publishing to persist for a given topic
> once one vocabulary for the topic has established itself as the de
> facto supported vocabulary for that topic.
>

That's true up to the point where you need to annotate some data that's so
specific to your use case that it's not covered in the de facto vocabulary.
Here is a concrete example covering the case of multi-vocabulary use on a
property and on a type. At the schema.org workshop, I had a discussion with
Rachel Sanders who is working on improving the scholarly article type for
schema.org. She's sent several properties to be added to the
schema.orgscholarly article type [1]. Many of them are very generic,
and she gave me
the example of the PubMed ID property which would probably not be accepted
on schema.org because it is too specific to the biomedical field. I build
websites with such articles where we want to annotate the PubMed ID as well
as the more generic article attributes. While we can to use
schema.orgproperties for the most part, we need to use a domain
specified vocabulary
to annotate the PubMed ID (using pmid from the Bibliographic Ontology [1]
for example). I also asked her about the various article types which the
Drupal Bibliography module supports (e.g. Conference proceedings, Book
Chapter, Thesis). Again, these seemed to be too specific for a generic
vocabulary like schema.org, and would need to be take from a domain specific
vocabulary.

So I agree with Henri that for generic types and properties, there will be a
convergence towards de facto vocabularies, but these vocabularies will never
cover the wide range of more domain specific application, and it's important
to let some room for these domain specific vocabularies to be used.

Steph.

[1]
http://groups.google.com/group/schemaorg-discussion/browse_thread/thread/6843b9ea4550a2a4/5c7cce75509b9979
[2] http://bibliontology.com/


>
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen@iki.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>