RE: Eurocentrism, incorrect unit abbreviations, and proprietary Royalist Engish (sic) terms

India is now the second largest English speaking country with about 125million English speakers projected to quadruple in the next 10 years.  (BTW India also went metric in 1956)

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20500312


The Commonwealth is generally both “Royalist English” and metric.

China has metric, Imperial and Chinese units in widespread use.  Why is American Imperial more important than Chinese units?  The real question is: “Why doesn’t the US adopt the metric system?”

http://www.us-metric.org/metric-signs-on-roads-in-the-u-s/


I could make a number of finer points about constitutional monarchy, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement and the Magna Carta that may colour your definition of “Royalist” offensive, in some circles … but this is neither the place nor the time.

/DavidG

From: Joe Duarte [mailto:songofapollo@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 4 July 2018 7:54 p.m.
To: schema.org Mailing List <public-schemaorg@w3.org>
Subject: Eurocentrism, incorrect unit abbreviations, and proprietary Royalist Engish terms

Hi all,

I have a few threads of feedback:

1. The schema is littered with incorrect abbreviations of American units. Examples:

  *   In the Vehicle schema<https://apac01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fschema.org%2FVehicle&data=02%7C01%7Cdavid.gibson%40southerncross.co.nz%7C16afd429124e4951b64708d5e183ab3a%7Ca97525bd1b704278b9c60e9ba38a6add%7C1%7C0%7C636662878004681395&sdata=VHdojKS5oMmWy20hxFtHKPNkZckmAUqxYGokWRVcJn4%3D&reserved=0>, for cargoVolume, it gives FTQ as the abbreviation for cubic feet.

  *   For fuelCapacity, it gives GLL for gallons.
I couldn't find any reference on the web that gave these abbreviations, so I'm stumped where they came from. Cubic feet can just be written as cubic feet, or cubic ft., or ft³.

And gallon is abbreviated gal.

For fuelConsumption, the schema doesn't even try to account for the US, and only refers to a European measure (liters per 100 km). (The US measure is miles per gallon, abbreviated as MPG.)

2. Which leads to a related observation. The schema is vividly Eurocentric, in that it seems designed around European norms rather than American ones. This is odd, since Schema.org sponsored mostly by American search companies, and there are 325 million people in the US vs. 65 million in Britain, for example.

Since the schema is in the English language, and the user base will be overwhelmingly American, I think it's more appropriate that we use American English by default, unless there's a contextual reason to use Royalist English. Here are some examples:

CampingPitch<https://apac01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fschema.org%2FCampingPitch&data=02%7C01%7Cdavid.gibson%40southerncross.co.nz%7C16afd429124e4951b64708d5e183ab3a%7Ca97525bd1b704278b9c60e9ba38a6add%7C1%7C0%7C636662878004681395&sdata=0ynzYCpuigUKjTywhgp%2FeyqgMKEW60q28nKA%2F6a6W88%3D&reserved=0> is not a term Americans will be familiar with. It's a Royalist* term.

Under Car, there are but two properties (from Car). I would expect these to be important, fundamental properties at the right level of ontological abstraction, but rather they are:

acrissCode – this is a coding system used by European car rental businesses. The description is so deeply Eurocentric that it doesn't even mention Europe, or the fact these codes are only used in Europe. It's as if the rest of the world doesn't exist. Any codes that are only used in certain countries or continents should be identified as so encumbered.

roofLoad – this is the second of the two core properties from Car. And again it has unit errors, this time across the board. It claims that a kilogram is abbreviated KGM, and pounds as LBR. The SI abbreviation for kilogram is kg, and for American customary units, pounds are lbs. This can be confirmed in any appropriate reference, including Wikipedia.

Note also that roofLoad is likely to be a European concern – Americans don't talk about it, and it's never advertised by carmakers here. In any case, we have properties for Car, and they are a European rental coding system and roofLoad. The Car schema is in pretty bad shape.

There are a lot more errors in the Schema, including repetitions of the bizarre, incorrect unit abbreviations.

3. The English-only instantiation of Schema.org also raises some important long-term questions. Do you plan to expand or mirror Schema.org into other major languages (French, Spanish, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.)? Or is it meant to be mostly Western focused? That still implicates some European languages. Moreover, if we create Schema.org for country-specific languages like French and German, we'll need to be sure to avoid the mistakes in the current schema, and have the French version littered with British assumptions, for example.

In summary, I think there are lots of problems with the schema right now, from bizarrely incorrect units, sections that do not contemplate the existence of the United States, and messy structures and hierarchies that do not meet normal ontological – or just logical – standards.

Is the team too small? Is it perhaps based in Europe? I'm happy to help. I'm working on a metadata schema for scientific research right now, and a couple of other schemas that I might propose for inclusion in Schema.org. In any case, I'm happy to help. I can look for pull request opportunities, and you might want to just hire me – I'm a social scientist who specializes intellectual and cultural diversity<https://apac01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.cambridge.org%2Fimages%2FfileUpload%2Fdocuments%2FDuarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cdavid.gibson%40southerncross.co.nz%7C16afd429124e4951b64708d5e183ab3a%7Ca97525bd1b704278b9c60e9ba38a6add%7C1%7C1%7C636662878004691400&sdata=FXCZAlGHl1qN75lRD%2BKcuzbpK5EIBYv%2B09g%2B%2FLoV2eI%3D&reserved=0> and how it helps science and teams. It would probably help to have someone on the team who knows mainstream American norms, with a rural background, who isn't white, who loves and knows cars very well, as well as ontology in general. Schema.org won't reach its full potential if it's run by a handful of urbanites in the Bay Area, Europe, etc. There would be too much cultural sameness and bias, and giving semantics to the web is a job for a culturally diverse team.

Cheers,

Joe Duarte, PhD
Phoenix, AZ, USA

* By Royalist English, I mean that which is spoken in countries where they bend the knee to the underemployed fashion models of the House of Windsor.

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