Re: Schema.org External Enumerations mechanism

After some discussion, etc., here is the next version of the proposal:

 The canonical urls that Schema.org recommends for use will the urls for
the entities on the reference sites (wikipedia, freebase, nist, etc.) When
these reference sites add new entities (such as South Sudan as a new
country), webmasters can immediately start using them.

 In addition, to make the common use case much easier, Schema.org will
provide documentation pages that list the entities (and their external
urls), along with the caveat that the external entity is the primary source.

 How does this sound?

guha

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>