Focus of this mailing list

Hi Dan, all: 

To me, it becomes unclear whether the focus of this mailing list is 
- mainly the open discussion about extending schema.org as a Web-scale vocabulary, or 
- a broader forum for debating conceptual modeling issues at large. 

I think that the schema.org sponsors should articulate the scope of the work on schema.org and this mailing list. Otherwise, it will become a time-consuming and fruitless effort. We should not try to develop a single, consensual world ontology in here. Such is doomed to failure. 

Here is a quick and obviously preliminary sketch of guidelines for assessing the relevance of future extensions for discussion:

- There is data available that will be published for consumption by search engines and crawlers and for which the owners agree with the usage by third parties.
- A minimum of two big (e.g. Fortune 500 company or major NGO) organizations will use the extension for publishing data.
- At least 100 smaller sites can be expected to adopt the extension within two months.
- The total number of types in schema.or remains below 1,000.
- The total number of properties per type in schema.org remains below 25 

This email is not meant to offend anybody. But I would like to stress that for developing a Web vocabulary proposal, there is no need to involve a very broad audience of potential users in the stages of designing the model. Just take 2 - 5 collaborators and a few potential adopters, codify the proposal, and sent the URI of the proposal for review. There are lots of other forums for general questions related to modeling the world, e.g.

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/
http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/ (kind of dead since 2006)


I fear that there are may people currently subscribed to the forum how are mainly interested in extending schema.org for articulating their site information to search engines and other clients. The community may loose the important potential adopters if the majority of traffic on this mailing list is for a very small audience only.

Best 

Martin Hepp

--------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 18:09:50 UTC