Re: Schema.org Actions - an update and call for review

On 7 August 2013 15:58, Dan Scott <dan@coffeecode.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 01:52:16PM +0200, Dan Brickley wrote:
>> Thanks everyone for the discussion and contributions - we made a few
>> improvements and have just published the initial version of this work
>> at schema.org:
>>
>> * http://schema.org/Action
>> * http://schema.org/docs/full.html
>> * Machine readable version is included in
>> http://schema.org/docs/schema_org_rdfa.html (plus a little RDFa/RDFS
>> in each per-term page).
>
> <snip>
>
>> As you can see,
>> there is plenty more to do, but we're glad to have achieved this
>> milestone as a foundation for richer description of actions. Please
>> let us know of any bugs, mistakes or inclarities and we'll do our best
>> to keep improving schema.org step by step.
>
> Looks like a great addition!

Thanks!

> I do find it odd that, in the markup examples, the original HTML is
> reduced to just a comment. Perhaps it's the lack of context for the
> examples that is confusing me, but I think it would make sense to retain
> the original HTML in the markup examples.

Yes, so there are several things going on here. One is pure
publication pragmatics. The existing schema.org site tooling had
"before" and "after" examples for Microdata, based on the idea of a
public Web page being improved. However with Actions, and more so as
we move towards future, personalised etc., actions, we're not always
talking about simple public Web pages. So for example I'm most
familiar with (I'm sure the other companies have interesting products
in the pipeline too), gmail
https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/embedding-schemas-in-emails
there was a lot of interest in using JSON-LD there. For example,
describing a multi-leg, multi-party flight reservation in JSON-LD is
significantly clearer than in Microdata (or RDFa). So this is why the
actions examples are currently in JSON-LD rather than markup; we
should probably add markup-based examples too.

Technically and in terms of site usability we need to figure out how
to improve our examples, to show both Microdata and RDFa, and
sometimes JSON-LD too. For now, I just changed the words "With
Microdata:" to "With Schema.org:", although this is as you point out
not idea.

>          One of the general goals of
> schema.org is to augment human-readable content with structured markup
> to help search engines; in the Action examples, however, we're removing
> human-readable content. I believe a simple fix could be to wrap the
> original HTML in a <div> and embed the <script> within the scope of that
> <div>?

Yes, I think these examples are more about indicating the typical
graph structure of the data, than enriching existing markup. We should
probably do both.

> In other cases, the JSON-LD markup example adds content that doesn't
> exist in the original HTML. For example, the example in
> http://schema.org/WriteAction adds the "name" property for the article.
> This was unexpected, as it doesn't follow the general pattern of
> examples only adding structured data assertions to the existing markup.

Fair point.

> Now that examples in the official schema.org site use JSON-LD, I would
> love to see http://schema.org/docs/gs.html updated with some
> instructions for the appropriate use of JSON-LD.
>
> In addition to the JSON-LD examples, are there any plans to incorporate
> microdata or RDFa Lite examples for Actions?

All reasonable requests! RDFa and Microdata are close enough that we
could maintain a common set of files, auto-converting one from the
other. JSON-LD is a bit different.

> My apologies if all of this is already on your roadmap for "plenty more
> to do"; I'm just trying to keep schema.org as approachable and easily
> adopted as possible. A hearty thanks to everyone for all the work that
> has already gone into the Actions effort!

Thanks! It's always good to hear from people and get a sense of which
things seem important from different perspectives...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2013 14:29:21 UTC