Re: Schema.org property cardinality and use of plural (WAS Re: SoftwareApplication proposal for schema.org)

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:25 PM, Will Norris <will@willnorris.com> wrote:


> To address the original question, I think singular and plural naming of
> properties is certainly one way (though not the only way) to imply the
> expected cardinality of a particular property.  Yes, you get the somewhat
> unusual mismatch of naming each individual instance with a plural name, but
> you're always going to run into this certain cases.  If were you use
> singular naming, you get weird results when you following the specified
> JSON mapping:
>
> {
>   "type": "http://schema.org/Person",
>   "properties": {
>     "child": [ { ... }, { ... } ]
>   }
> }
>

I would prefer to see the potentially confusing mismatch be on the JSON
(consumer) side rather than the HTML (publisher) side.

I say this because I think we can expect a higher degree of technical
understanding from consumers who are processing the data than we can from
Web content authors who are publishing the data. In order to move the
mismatch from publishers to consumers, terms need to be singular


> I think the same would apply to cardinality.  We provide guidance on
> expected cardinality of properties, but always do the best we can with
> whatever we get.
>
>
I agree that it is good for large scale Schema.org consumers to do the best
with whatever they get. However, that's more difficult for smaller scale
projects. For example, I am working with the Drupal community to develop a
tool that relies on HTML data to bring together content in sensible ways
and I would like to rely on Schema.org for the vocabulary. The amount of
available resource that we can put into this project is magnitudes smaller
than the resources the search engines have available (I would assume, at
least). Therefore, if there is mass confusion about how to use the terms,
we're much less likely to be able to build upon it.

-Lin