Re: question about medical code

Hi,

Responses below.

> Ivan Herman expressed some similar concerns, but I believe he is traveling
> and may not have time to chime in. From his statements I got the impression
> that there may be an assumption that everything in schema.org has to be
> expressible *both* as microformat data AND as RDFa, using the same property
> declarations. I don't know if this has been stated as a requirement in the
> larger schema.org community, but I fear that it isn't practical, since it
> forces the looser microformat data metadata to follow RDFa requirements. We
> may thus lose the simplicity that some communities desire. Admittedly the
> microformat data may be less precise. Then again, what data people are
> putting in their web pages is often imprecise. I don't think we should try
> to force precision on them.

First, we ought not to confuse Microdata [1] with Microformats [2].
While the Schema.org partners have chosen to consume Microdata and
RDFa Lite, they have not agreed to support Microformats beyond some
they already consume.

I don't think this group should try to make any recommendation that
would work in RDFa and not work in the more constrained RDFa Lite or
Microdata, since it is these syntaxes that the Schema.org partners
have agreed to consume.

> The question seems to be whether RDFa compliance is to be the test for every
> proposal for schema.org vocabularies. It definitely does not seem to have
> been in the past. Perhaps we need to ask this of DanBri?

I think you can refer to the Compliance section of this page:
http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html

"While we would like all the markup we get to follow the schema, in
practice, we expect a lot of data that does not. We expect schema.org
properties to be used with new types. We also expect that often, where
we expect a property value of type Person, Place, Organization or some
other subClassOf Thing, we will get a text string. In the spirit of
"some data is better than none", we will accept this markup and do the
best we can."

I'm not sure what is meant by RDFa compliance, since RDFa Lite is
completely compliant with RDFa. It may not be as powerful and expose
all of the features we might like, but it is still compliant. I think
the best we can do is to provide examples of what would be best (like
provide a URI when possible), but expect that some publishers will
just enter a text string. The onus for complexity and sorting out poor
data is on the consumers and on the producers.

Jason


[1] Microdata http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/microdata.html
[2] Microformats http://microformats.org/

Received on Saturday, 26 January 2013 17:22:42 UTC