Re: A milestone

On 1 April 2015 at 15:49, Ralph Swick <swick@w3.org> wrote:
> I am very pleased to see this Community Group commence.  I look forward
> to this community becoming a model for future collaborations on the
> management of core vocabularies for the Web.

Thanks Ralph! I am very pleased to see a CG for Schema.org too. I
believe the Community Group model ought to be a good fit for
structured data vocabulary development and maintenance, and it will be
interesting to explore how much we can identify general approaches,
workflow, tools etc.

Now that April Fool's Day and (in some countries) Easter are safely
behind us, I think we can start to get things moving here. For those
who have followed schema.org's evolution, public-vocabs@w3.org and
schema.org on Github there will be no huge surprises. But a brief
recap and status report is useful.


The idea is that this W3C Community Group becomes schema.org's primary
discussion forum, replacing our use of the public-vocabs 'Web Schemas'
task force list. The original search engine sponsors will continue to
oversee the publication of new and updated schemas, but we'll also
continue the practice of basing those decisions on broader discussion
and debate, and working towards rough consensus for schema changes.

Around a year ago the schema.org site was migrated to run from an
opensource Python-based app (implemented currently via Google
AppEngine) and we migrated all schema files, examples etc into a
simple Github repository. This arrangement has already made several
things easier: it helps with quick fixes to schemas, examples and
python code. It allows more technical collaborators to use Git(hub)'s
forking and branching mechanisms to develop larger proposed changes,
and it provides a nicely integrated issue tracking tool that is
reasonably easy to use.

The ability (via AppEngine) to run experimental copies of the
schema.org site locally or on appspot.com has also helped improve the
workflow and collaboration around proposals - it has helped move us
from a situation where proposals arrived as email messages or PDFs to
a much more manageable situation in which proposals arrive already
fully specified and implemented.

The next natural evolution of this is the Extensions model outlined in
the thread Guha started last month,
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2015Mar/0117.html -
as mentioned in that post, we are moving towards having a first
implementation. I have been working on that in the 'sdo-scripts'
branch on Github.  And in terms of new, improved, fixed and revised
schemas, changes towards our next official release (codenamed
'sdo-gozer') are also underway in the (currently default) Github
sdo-branch, see https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg

The current expectation is that both the Extensions implementation
(once some bugs are fixed) and a bundle of schema improvements will
both go into the next release. The issue tracker at
https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues has a milestone for
'sdo-gozer release' and a label 'schema.org vocab'. Combined these
give a reasonable picture of the raw materials:

https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22schema.org+vocab%22

At this point there is no rigid release date fixed for sdo-gozer, and
the choice of which of the 35 open 'schema.org' vocab issues listed
are feasible to close is up for discussion. Do please take a look
around that list and jump into discussions. I believe in most cases
we'll find that Github issues (rather than giant email threads here)
is the most productive place for discussion. So I encourage Community
Group members to get set up with Github accounts if you don't already
have them. Many other W3C groups are also making extensive use of Git
and Github, so it should repay some learning time.

Over the coming days the Github issue list will get some attention. I
won't make this mail any longer by going into specific issues here.
Currently the best high level overview of pending changes for a
release is the file named 'docs/releases.html'. So the last published
schema changes are recorded in http://schema.org/docs/releases.html
whereas pending changes are sketchily queued up in
http://sdo-gozer.appspot.com/docs/releases.html (an appspot version of
the sdo-gozer Github branch).

Ok that was probably too much information! What I meant to say was
really just "Welcome everyone, I look forward to (continuing to) work
with you!"

cheers,

Dan

Received on Thursday, 9 April 2015 15:57:25 UTC