Re: Proposal to add dateExpires to JobPosting

Nicholas:

For historical reasons, most Web vocabularies use American English for their natural language definitions. While I am not a native speaker, I am pretty confident that "valid through" is proper American English. More than 5,000,000 pages in the Google index use that term. schema.org and GoodRelations use American English in many other places, like http://schema.org/Organization.

The important thing, however, is that the natural language used in Web vocabularies mainly serves the purpose of empowering people from various cultural backgrounds to properly grasp the intension of the conceptual elements. Nothing less and nothing more. It is clear that a bold, cross-cultural endeavor like schema.org cannot meet all expectations from language purists from all parts of the world, while at the same time serving the needs of hundreds of thousands of Web developers, of which most are not native speakers of British English.

Just for clarification: I am not religious about the particular decision of whether validFrom should be renamed to validUntil, except that there are already ca. 50,000,000 Web pages using gr:validThrough, so any change may cause some pain and data quality issues. My main point it that it is useless to argue about the purity of natural language definitions in Web vocabularies that aim at global adoption. It is inevitable that there will be painful pidgin, and our decisions must be based solely on which natural language definitions maximize the proper usage of the conceptual element at Web scale, and nothing else.

Best wishes

Martin Hepp


On Oct 29, 2012, at 2:10 PM, Nicholas Shanks wrote:

> On 26 Oct 2012, at 16:21, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 26 October 2012 07:57, Nicholas Shanks <nickshanks@nickshanks.com> wrote:
>>> "validThrough" is a horrible name, it grammatically grates on the ear
>>> and sounds much too american for professional use. Please consider a
>>> phrase such as validUntil instead.
>> 
>> Can we avoid ethnic/nationalistic slurs on this mailing list please. I
>> have it on good authority that many Americans are quite professional
>> these days.
> 
> Hi Dan, thanks for taking the bait.
> It's true, my knee-jerk reaction was gurgh! That's an Americanismh and form my fingers into a cross to ward off it's inherent evil, but if I had just written my raw emotions, no-one would have paid any attention to me. As Ian Hickson often alludes to, the plight of the front-line coder is often under-represented when standards are being drawn up, as they do not get representation, or if represented, their voice is frequently drowned out. In order to make our voice heard, as individuals, we have to tweak to noses of those in power, or in larger numbers we can take up our metaphorical pitch forks and march on the capital.
> 
> The sub-context of my message was that dialectal phrases, be they Scots, Scouser, Geordie or as I believe is true in this case, from the Mid- and Western US, are inappropriate for use in an English-based vocabulary which is to be used by thousands of speakers of other dialects, and learnt by hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers. I feel that those in positions of responsibility should not be teaching them ebad Englishf (i.e. English which is not universal to all speakers). I doubt you would have replied if I had used a non-specific term such as etoo regionalf or etoo dialectalf?
> 
> At least it wasn't spelt ethruf :)
> 
> \ Nicholas.
> 

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

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Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 09:10:52 UTC