- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:30:40 +0200
- To: public-vocabs@w3.org
There is a near-final draft in the Wiki at http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/ExternalEnumerations describing a mechanism for including externally enumerated datasets within schema.org. The approach we adopt tries to find a middle-ground between some design constraints. We want a simple, regular notation for schema.org publishers, while also drawing on various rich and detailed collections of identifiers found 'out there' in the decentralized Web. At schema.org we will maintain a list of supported datasets / vocabularies, and we'll configure URIs at ext.schema.org to correspond to entries in a variety of systems (e.g. Wikipedia/Wikidata, UDC, LCSH, UN FAO country codes, ...). Although individual search engines may decide to consume other patterns, at this stage the only collective commitment expected is that URLs matching http://ext.schema.org/* will be recognised as belonging to "external enumerations" that extend and enrich schema.org. The expectation is that this will improve schema.org's expressive coverage without bloating the core schema. If you look at our current schema, you'll see for example 27 or so subclasses of http://schema.org/LocalBusiness ... quite a list, and yet not enough to exhaustively cover things. Or http://schema.org/PlaceOfWorship which has six subtypes listing specific kinds of places of worship. The schema.org partners (or the W3C Web Schemas group) aren't the right people to come up with detailed lists of such things - it would be a neverending task. Rather, we need a mechanism that integrates such detail into the existing descriptive machinery provided by the core schema.org schema. To address this, schema.org external enumerations mechanism should be able to supply both property values and sub-types; we'll elaborate on Units and Measures in a later revision. Questions and comments to this list please, cheers, Dan
Received on Thursday, 19 April 2012 18:31:10 UTC