Re: Schema.org considered helpful

>
> >The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
> >had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
> >spending time doing usability testing and focussing on user-feedback
> >on common problems (such as the rather obvious "vocabulary hosting"
> >problem) rather than focussing on things with little to no support
> >with the world outside academia, then we probably would not be in the
> >situation we are in today.
>
> That's interesting. Was there anybody who pointed this out at the time?


Yes. Most notably, Ian Hickson pointed it out in direct relation to RDFa and
Microdata

   - http://www.mail-archive.com/whatwg@lists.whatwg.org/msg11067.html
   - http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Change_Proposal_for_ISSUE-120

Paola di Malo has often brought up the need for the SemWeb community to look
to the methods of the software engineering discipline, with it's greater
focus on empirical analysis of how developers use tools. I know that these
discussions have come up on
lists<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2010Jul/0355.html>
and
in discussions at conferences like ISWC because I have been a part of those
discussions. So I don't think the community can say it hasn't been informed.

Moreover, I don't think a scientific community should need to be told to be
empirical and use the scientific method. That should be the default. As I
said on the semantic-web list last year:

"If assertions about human use are part of the argument, then
empirical research
about how humans use the tools should be a part of the research and evaluation.
We need to build a scientific literature that actually addresses these
issues instead of assuming that human mind is the best of all possible
(logical)
worlds."

I don't want to start a fight on this list, there are already enough of
those going on and I have a feeling those are pushing potentially interested
people away from joining the effort. I just wanted to note that yes, it has
been pointed out.

-Lin

--
Lin Clark
DERI, NUI Galway <http://www.deri.ie/>

lin-clark.com
twitter.com/linclark