Re: Schema.org in RDF ... expected Types in RDFS

On 6/6/11 3:37 PM, glenn mcdonald wrote:
> It seems pretty clear to me that schema.org <http://schema.org> is a 
> good step for data and humans. It's unlikely to be the end of 
> anything, and I have my own set of particular issues and regrets** 
> about it, but it's a potentially huge visibility/credibility boost for 
> the ideas of structured data and common vocabularies. It's absolutely 
> telling that it's already dominating discussion at SemTech, despite 
> the conference being barely started here in SF. And maybe even more 
> telling that it was done outside of the Semantic Web community. I 
> think we (the SW "we") should find that embarrassing, not offensive.
>
> glenn
>
> **My top three reservations about schema.org <http://schema.org> in 
> its initial form:
>
> 1. I /really/ wish they'd given Thing an ID, separate from URL. I do 
> not expect the URLs we get from this to be reliably usable as identifiers.
>
> 2. I wish they'd made types for everything, not mixed Things and 
> "plain" values. But then, people do this in RDF all the time, too. I 
> think it's one of the signs that the toolset still makes doing the 
> right thing painful, just as people cram stuff into denormalized 
> tables because RDBMSes make doing actual relational databases painful.
>
> 3. Honestly, I'm still totally not sold on the idea of embedding 
> structured data in HTML. To scale, this stuff is going to have to be 
> generated by the underlying data-management tools anyway, at which 
> point I don't see why it isn't strictly better for everybody to have 
> HTML for human consumption (unbloated by presentation-irrelevant data 
> markup) and Data (in whatever serialization) for machine consumption 
> (uncluttered by presentation markup/contingencies/layout). Even for 
> Rich Snippets-like purposes this seems like it would be simpler to 
> devise, produce and consume...

Great summary!


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Kingsley Idehen 
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OpenLink Software
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