Re: Schema.org and OWL

As the author of the originating email in this trail, asking a question
that [scanning the subsequent 50 plus replies] now feels wildly off topic,
I think I should add my couple of cents.

Firstly, on the practical needs behind my original appeal for help.

Many thanks to those that were of great help inside and outside of this
thread.

The latest version of Schema.org (V3.4) was released yesterday.  It
contains an experimental updated version of the schemaorg.owl file which
addresses issues such as being understood by tools such as Protégé; the
representation of domainIncludes & rangeIncludes values in a way those
tools can understand them and; the implicit inclusion of Text, URL, and Role
in the rangeIncludes of most properties.  More information can be found on
the Developers Page <https://schema.org/docs/developers.html#owl>.

I feel it is important to emphasise part of the comments on that page:

 “The mapping into OWL is an approximation, and should not be considered an
authoritative definition for Schema.org’s terms; see datamodel page
<https://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html> for details. As an experimental
feature, there are no expectations as to its interpretation by any third
party tools.”

This experimental file was updated to help view Schema.org in various ways,
not as a backdoor way of controlling its structure.

Secondly, my brief thoughts on the discussion that has since ensued.

In my work consulting with and helping organisations and individuals
wishing to introduce Schema.org markup into their web presence and;
chairing, and participating in, W3C community groups focussed on improving
Schema.org for specific domains such as tourism, libraries, archives,
educational courses, qualifications etc., I come across two main barriers
to understand, for those new to the vocabulary.

   - Those that are new to structured data who have had no exposure to
   anything like Schema.org.  The concepts of Types, Properties, inheritance,
   etc., are foreign to them as are the needs to describe Things (entities)
   and their relationships.  This group (to reference the previous discussion)
   just want to know which type to use to describe a Car, what properties that
   Type makes available, and how to use them in a way that is acceptable to a
   test tool such as Google’s SDTT
   <https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool>.  If a Car is a
   type of Product, or not, has no particular relevance to their use of the
   Type.

   - Those that come from an ontological background that over concern
   themselves with the potential implicit semantics inherent in the Type
   hierarchy, and chosen type names — Is an ExercisePlan really a CreativeWork
   or not?

As an aside, running a training session containing several members from
both of those groups can be a very interesting experience!

It has, and will continue to be, very important to continue to shape the
vocabulary (by broad pragmatic consensus from those that benefit from it)
to address the practical needs of those groups whilst not making it
difficult for the majority.

As pointed out earlier the Schema.org vocabulary, since its inception in
2011, has been implemented on 10s of millions of websites on gazillions of
pages, and is at the heart of the crawling activities of the major search
engines and their testing tools.  As such its continuing development can be
analogised to an oil tanker navigating the needs of structured data on the
web, accepting course corrections to steer a few degrees to port or
starboard.  In that analogy some of the suggestions in this thread would be
considered to be a command to steer 90º starboard of our current course.

Note I keep calling Schema.org a *vocabulary*, not an *ontology*, a subtle
but important distinction I find when talking to others.  It is a set of
useful Types and properties mainly for describing things on the web to aid
their discovery and their place in global knowledge graphs. The term
definition pages on the Schema.org site providing guidance and examples of
how they might be used. The type hierarchy is a way of grouping loosely
similar concepts together and inheriting sets of useful properties to aid
markup.

If we were to start again would Schema.org be very different? In detail
very probably, but in overall design and approach (considering the overall
needs it is satisfying) I think not.

These discussions and suggestions are important and valuable to help nudge
our course in helpful directions.  But we do need to be aware of the
practical and pragmatic needs of those don’t know, need or want to know
what the heck we are talking about here.

So I encourage discussions such as this one, I inadvertently triggered.  We
just need to take into account that they are at one edge of a very broad
spectrum of needs and interests of those who will, and have already, gained
significant benefits from its existence, adoption, and continued evolution.

~Richard.





Richard Wallis
Founder, Data Liberate
http://dataliberate.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
Twitter: @rjw

On 15 June 2018 at 08:18, Martin Hepp <mfhepp@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Anthony:
>
> The main thing to see in here is that types in schema.org are mostly used
> for grouping entites for which the same type of processing by major
> consumers of such data is appropriate. We are not trying to develop a fully
> application-agnostic system of types.
>
> Many of the contributors of schema.org have been in ontology engineering
> since the beginning of that discipline, and over time, we have learned that
> the pure ideal of fully detaching conceptual data models, and namely
> relationship types and entity types, from any notion of the processing task
> expected on the data, will not work.
>
> I think there is a nice quote by R.V. Guha on this topic somewhere in the
> list archive, but I don't find it right now.
>
> Historically, data structures and algorithms have always been considered a
> duality in Computer Science. The community that reused the term "ontology"
> from Philosophy to CS in the 1990s and redefined it as a word for shared
> conceptual data models that try to represent the "real structures of the
> world" wanted to decouple data structures from algorithms. While this aim
> was well intended, it turned out to be a dead end, because you can
> endlessly debate about what these "real structures of the world" are, as
> long as you do not have a metric for measuring your archievement.
>
> All models, and data models are no exception, are purpose-bound
> simplifications of a domain of interest. You can only assess the quality of
> a model with regard to a purpose. It is invalid to critize a model for
> being too granular, too coarse, or otherwise deficient, unless this
> defiency is observable in the area of application for which the model is
> intended.
>
> Best wishes
> Martin
> -----------------------------------
> martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
> mhepp@computer.org          @mfhepp
>
>
>
>
> > On 15 Jun 2018, at 08:59, <Simon.Cox@csiro.au> <Simon.Cox@csiro.au>
> wrote:
> >
> > 1.       domainIncludes and rangeIncludes are not exhaustive. Multiple
> values are linked by an open OR, not exclusive AND (major difference to
> RDFS)
> > 2.       its OK to be a member of more than one class. It’s OK for
> something to be both a Product and CreativeWork.
> >
> > From: Anthony Moretti [mailto:anthony.moretti@gmail.com]
> > Sent: Friday, 15 June, 2018 16:30
> > To: Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com>
> > Cc: Martin Hepp <mfhepp@gmail.com>; elf Pavlik <
> elf-pavlik@hackers4peace.net>; public-schemaorg@w3.org; Thad Guidry <
> thadguidry@gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: Schema.org and OWL
> >
> > Thanks for the links guys.
> >
> > I'm definitely not trying to make Schema into "one true logical model of
> the world", I do always think it's worthy to strive for simplicity and
> consistency though, something maybe similar in intention to code
> refactoring.
> >
> > Here is a problem that exists now though because of overly specific
> domains - if I want to describe the height of the Eiffel Tower, a Place,
> I'd want to use the "height" property, but the only types "height" can be
> used on are MediaObject, Person, Product, and VisualArtwork. I completely
> get the volcano-with-fax-number approach, and I'm actually a big fan of it,
> that's why I propose moving properties such as "height" to Thing. A
> guideline that Schema might be able to apply here could take inspiration
> from the rule of three - whenever a property is used on more than two types
> move it to the parent type. Using this guideline "height" would be on
> Thing, and could then be used to describe the Eiffel Tower.
> >
> > I'll end now with one final suggestion, I realize it probably has no
> chance of going anywhere, but I'll put it out there for consideration
> anyway. After moving those properties to Thing I realized that because
> CreativeWork, Product, and Intangible don't have clear definitions all they
> do is add complexity (how many times is it asked whether products are also
> creative works and vice versa). It would arguably be simpler to have all
> their properties on Thing and ThingType. This is in line with the
> volcano-with-fax-number approach, and would give great flexibility.
> >
> > Thanks for all the discussion!
> >
> > Anthony
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 4:09 PM Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Jun 2018 at 15:19, Anthony Moretti <anthony.moretti@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I think Martin's point about passing information from product types to
> product instances can be addressed higher in the hierarchy than Product
> actually. I sense people are opposed to shifting properties from more
> specific types to Thing though (maybe I don't understand something, can
> someone please explain that to me?) My view is that using overly specific
> domains for properties causes strange entailment, e.g. in its current form
> the "height" property entails the subject is either a MediaObject, Person,
> Product, or VisualArtwork, which doesn't seem right.
> >
> > On this point - "e.g. in its current form the "height" property entails
> the subject is either a MediaObject, Person, Product, or VisualArtwork,
> which doesn't seem right." -- we don't really say that anywhere, and in
> fact we created looser variants of rdfs domain/range for documentation, to
> avoid saying more than we wanted to. On the contrary, in
> http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html  -
> >
> > "When we list the expected types associated with a property (or
> vice-versa) we aim to indicate the main ways in which these terms will be
> combined in practice. This aspect of schema.org is naturally imperfect.
> For example the schemas for Volcano suggest that since volcanoes are
> places, they may have fax numbers. Similarly, we list the unlikely (but not
> infeasible) possibility of a Country having "opening hours". We do not
> attempt to perfect this aspect of schema.org's structure, and instead
> rely heavily on an extensive collection of illustrative examples that
> capture common and useful combinations of schema.org terms. The
> type/properties associations of schema.org are closer to "guidelines"
> than to formal rules, and improvements to the guidelines are always
> welcome."
> >
> > In this regard, you might view this aspect of Schema.org as being closer
> to the "The Code is more what you call guidelines, than actual rules"
> tradition of the Pirates of the Caribbean than the expectations you might
> bring from the OWL world, even if we target much the same underlying data
> model.
> >
> > If this might seem less thank helpful, I'd suggest a possible
> middle-ground would be to explore the RDF validation languages - SHACL and
> ShEx - which suggest ways of layering certain kinds of discipline over
> messy RDF data. It doesn't address all the modeling concerns raised here,
> but does offer another layer of expressivity which needn't happen in the
> core project.  You could look at https://www.topquadrant.com/
> technology/shacl/tutorial/ or http://book.validatingrdf.com/ -- e.g.
> http://datashapes.org/schema attempts to capture some ofschema.org itself
> in SHACL, whereas https://github.com/SEMICeu/dcat-ap_shacl/ (in SHACL)
> and https://github.com/SEMICeu/dcat-ap_shacl/issues/32 (in ShEx) try to
> capture specific useful community-specific patterns for describing
> datasets. These languages let people say things about Schema.org data
> structures, beyond what the project itself chooses to say. For example by
> constructing and documenting more tidy-minded subsets/profiles, or mixing
> it with longer tail vocabularies (like Wikidata's e.g. see Thad and
> friends' mappings) or richer domain models e.g. from the sciences, and
> explaining sensible patterns for these combinations. You could look at what
> the Blue Brain project are doing there, for example -
> https://github.com/BlueBrain/nexus-kg/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%
> 93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+shacl or the ShEx efforts around HL7/FHIR,
> https://www.hl7.org/fhir/medication.shex.html
> >
> > That kind of perspective I think makes two points. One is that
> Schema.org's modeling style and hierarchical structure is not the only
> place where discipline can be exercised usefully; and the second is that
> more "knowledge graphy" usecases (beyond simple Web markup) are likely to
> engage with other vocabularies and systems (e.g. scientific domains or
> general like Wikidata), in which case we're unlikely to see a unified
> modeling style across it all, and will likely end up focussing - again - on
> documenting usefully re-usable patterns that address particular situations.
> >
> > Dan
>
>
>