Re: Audience for Schema Bib extension

Hi Kevin:

My assumptions agree with yours on the schema.org audience.

To that end, I think there is at least one clear use case for extensions, which I had mentioned on IRC #schemabibex after the first call and which was also raised in the last call if my reading & memory of the transcript is accurate. That is, similar to how scholar.google.com recognizes user IP address ranges and serves up links that lead directly to electronic resources licensed by the corresponding institution (assuming that you've gone through the process of exposing your electronic holdings in Scholar format and told Scholar to go ahead and read them), I think the schema.org principle search engines (hereafter referred to as "SoPSE") would benefit from rewarding users who search via their search interface with links to instances of the requested resources at institutions associated with the current user.

Geo-IP could point directly at public libraries where the resource can be accessed rather than relying on the OCLC middleman, and the user's ability to access restricted resources (e.g. borrowing by GLAM institution members only) could be via some combination of IP range or explicit affiliations in the user's SoPSE account, so that inaccessible resources wouldn't clutter search results. The explicit benefit to the SoPSE is that explicit affliliations strengthen signals that the SoPSE can then use to serve up relevant ads to that user, and of course the SoPSE can offer users the option of immediately purchasing a personal digital license for the resource via the SoPSE's Music / Books / other licensing & vending services.

A possible side benefit that PSEs would gain from having physical & electronic resources surfaced via a schema.org extension is that they might be able to evolve from the Google Scholar "export and refresh a list of resources in a specific format" model towards a more standard "crawl based on published sitemaps & microdata" model.

Again, if I recall the transcript of the last call correctly, DAIA was suggested as a potential model for extending schema.org to surface holdings information. I, for one, would be interested in working on defining and incorporating such an extension in Evergreen as a testbed.

A second use case for extensions, then, would be to define some more object types that can be surfaced in schema.org beyond the current list at the bottom of http://schema.org/CreativeWork - Jeff Young touched on this in the kick-off call, if I recall correctly. For example, surely something like "Journal" or "Periodical" (perhaps reflecting a collection of http://schema.org/Article - similar to how http://schema.org/Blog represents a collection of http://schema.org/BlogPosting ) needs to be added...

Dan Scott

>>> On 11/5/2012 at 04:34 PM, Kevin Ford <kefo@3windmills.com> wrote: 
> Dear All,
> 
> In the interest of moving this along, is it possible for us to identify 
> the audience for the schema.org bibliographic extension?
> 
> Personally, I think it is rather simple: search engines generally, but 
> primarily Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.  I'm not against other consumers 
> (those that are not search engines) but I would like to know why/how the 
> schema.org vocabulary should be modified for those additional consumers 
> and, perhaps more importantly, how/why the schema.org maintainers would 
> accept those recommendations if they do not benefit the schema.org 
> designers.  I suspect a justification will have to be made for the 
> extension to find approval.  Is this assumption correct?
> 
> In any event, I think that clearly identifying the audience for this 
> extension would help us focus not only the use cases but also the 
> resulting extension recommendation.
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Kevin
> 
> --
> Kevin Ford
> Network Development and MARC Standards Office
> Library of Congress
> Washington, DC

Received on Monday, 5 November 2012 22:49:37 UTC