Re: Schema.org External Enumerations mechanism

On 22 April 2012 15:41, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:

Just to clarify with an example...

> But where is the tangible utility in using schema.org URLs? As noted
> earlier, they actually add friction to the system.

...ok, I'm visiting my mother this week, and a couple miles down the
road is a hill fort called "Fin Cop". So how would I talk about that
in microdata?

I've no idea offhand what detail is available in schema.org for
classifying places, but I can remember there is some coverage. So I
start at:

http://schema.org/Place

I see:

http://schema.org/LandmarksOrHistoricalBuildings

and using an example from the Place page I already have:

  <div itemprop="location" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/LandmarksOrHistoricalBuildings">
    <a itemprop="url" href="...to be decided...">
    Fin Cop
    </a>
  </div>

But which URL to use?

Wikipedia is blessed, so I search there and find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_Cop

Paste that into my markup, job done.

Unless I want to use the schema.org alias. In which case I have to
look up the appropriate template/mapping, apply it, and then use that
URL.

http://ext.schema.org/wikipedia/en/Fin_Cop

Job done - after an extra step.

Out of curiosity I had a quick go at getting a term for describing a
place in a similar fashion using existing RDF vocabs. Starting with:
http://sindice.com/search?q=Place
a couple of clicks later I had:

http://sw.opencyc.org/2009/04/07/concept/en/AncientSite
Same as:
http://umbel.org/umbel/sc/AncientSite

- though there appear to be a lot of other alternatives.

Putting "Fin Cop" into Google search, the most compelling-looking URL
for the place on the first page of hits is the Wikipedia one (4th on
the list here).

So as far as the effort needed to find suitable terms, there wasn't
really very much to choose between them. For data consumers, it seems
probable that in due course the schema.org class will be more useful
simply because of wider deployment. But well-known vocabularies like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/* are already widely deployed on the web
(as regular links)...so why bother aliasing them?

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://dannyayers.com

http://webbeep.it  - text to tones and back again

Received on Sunday, 22 April 2012 16:50:03 UTC