- From: Mike Bergman <mike@mkbergman.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:50:25 -0600
- To: public-vocabs@w3.org
Hi All, I have a recommendation on the SKOS issue, if you will bear with me, but the length of this inherited thread and its esoterica, I think, affirm two observations: 1) since the Good Relations adoption, there is a desire (precedent) to want to find additional vocabularies that can be sanctioned by schema.org's market position 2) schema.org risks becoming the new forum for all sorts of semantic folly and discussion. I think both of these are a mistake. As for 1), I can appreciate that Martin has worked the system well enough to get his vocabulary accepted. It is a good vocabulary, and Martin is a diligent advocate. But, frankly, I don't think this is a model we want to see perpetuated. There are multiple realms that conceivably deal with important dimensions of the "schema" scope; do we seriously think it is the role of this forum to find those encompassing descriptions? Vocabulary acceptance is ultimately, I think, a market position, and not any role or responsibility of schema.org. The *sponsors* of schema.org, however, do have what amounts to much market clout. If they like something, they will adopt it; if not, they won't. The choices they make as players in making schema.org stuff prominent or not will (in part) determine their own market performance. I accept this, and whatever this forum does, it has no ultimate bearing on these sponsors' market decisions. This forum is not the W3C (and even the W3C making such determinations has little bearing on this market). I also firmly believe that vocabulary extensions from concepts to products to whatever should be accommodated for within a schema.org framework. My issue is solely whether any single extension warrants sanction. Extension mechanisms, yes; specific vocabularies, no. As for 2), I think that is just a natural outcome of looking to schema.org as some kind of "answer" to what used to be known as the "chicken-and-egg dilemma" for the semantic Web. The best thing about schema.org is that it is a pragmatic forum to discuss prominent types of things and their attributes. My advice is to try to keep schema.org as a relatively pure location for important value:pair discussions. We'll get to the big stuff -- and perhaps even schema.org will be in part one vehicle for doing so -- by-and-by, but this is a forum for *market importance* not theory. As for the SKOS stuff, we (Structured Dynamics) use it much. But the premise of the adoption into schema.org fits into that same dysfunctionality I noted above: trying to make schema.org an umbrella for sanctioned subsidiary vocabularies. I believe this to be a Bad Idea. My simple suggestion is to move "about" to become a property of Thing and not CreativeWorks (which, after reflection, is a placement that is silly). Then, with an extension mechanism that recognizes an external namespace (say, gr: or umbel: or dc:) enable that (or perhaps, many other schema: properties) to extend the umbrella. As for SKOS, I think it is generally orthogonal to a schema.org specification. Like any vocabulary on the Web, map to the concepts that make sense for you. If "about" with namespace recognition were added to schema.org, there would be no further questions about what to do with SKOS or any other Web vocabulary. schema.org != semantic web Thanks, Mike -- __________________________________________ Michael K. Bergman CEO Structured Dynamics LLC 319.621.5225 skype:michaelkbergman http://structureddynamics.com http://mkbergman.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/mkbergman __________________________________________
Received on Friday, 11 January 2013 04:50:54 UTC