- From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:13:55 +0200
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Cc: public-vocabs@w3.org
On 19 April 2012 20:30, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote: [snip] I'm really not sure there's any net benefit over using the original URIs. Ok, there's conflict between the identification of a thing and that of a document about the thing. Having schema.org "bless" a given vocabulary is arguably a good thing, but the minting of new URIs for the vocabularies seems redundant. HTML authors *are* used to pointing to e.g. Wikipedia for definitions, what is to be gained from centralizing things further? There are at least two approaches that will achieve the same ends without compromising the distributed nature of the Web - 1. refer to a target page directly, tweak property definition so instead of: <link itemprop="nationality" href="http://ext.schema.org/wikipedia/en/United_States"/> we'd have: <link itemprop="nationality" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" /> I can't actually see a definition of "nationality", but the conflict mentioned above would be avoided if it were defined as being "a page describing the nationality". 2. refer to a target resource directly <link itemprop="nationality" href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/United_States" /> It could be argued that perhaps dbPedia isn't likely to be as stable a reference as Wikipedia. But nothing can be considered rock solid for perpetuity, we just have to trust in Cool URIs. The argument about "correct and currently fashionable standard" isn't very compelling, in fact there's quite a strong counter-argument: if person uses the definition from Wikipedia today, should it be schema.org's decision tomorrow that what they /really/ mean is the definition from Encyclopedia Universalis? As for the "regular markup" argument, the target systems already use regular markup, and the URIs appear to be shorter. Perhaps a more significant angle is: how does someone find a suitable URI for e.g. "Linear Algebras" by Gilbert Strang? If we're deferring to the Library of Congress for definition, then it'd be appropriate to go and search over there - and the result is given *in their naming scheme*, it needs modifying to get it into schema.org's. That's more friction, not less. Even with my architecture astronaut's helmet on I reckon the basic approach of schema.org is an experiment worth trying, relaxing a constraint of the traditional semweb approach to encourage more publication of data (well, "constraint" is a bit strong for the idea that vocabularies should be distributed, nothing's ever ruled out having biggish centralized vocabs). Whatever, pragmatism trumps holy cows. But the use of schema.org URIs for terms from collections like Wikipedia doesn't really seem to offer any significant concrete benefit in return for it's compromise. Cheers, Danny. -- http://dannyayers.com http://webbeep.it - text to tones and back again
Received on Friday, 20 April 2012 09:14:28 UTC