Re: WebSchemas, Schema.org and W3C

I enthusiastically endorse the ideas posted by Dan, Bernard, and Phil from a
DCMI perspective.

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 05:45:22PM +0100, Bernard Vatant wrote:
> Discovering vocabularies might be tough, although we have more and more
> tools for that (not to mention LOV again here), but assessing those three
> key parameters (quality, sustainability, responsibilty) is a headache
> mainly because many vocabulary publishers do not take them seriously, as
> attested by the crying lack of documentation and metadata for many of them.
> We have now serious people and orgnizations eager to enter the linked data
> game, and I meet more and more the question : "can we trust X or Y to be
> still available in 5-10 years?"
...
> We have already exchanged with Tom Baker on this, DCMI have thought seriously about
> those issues for a while as you (Dan) are well aware of. 2013 should be a
> year of serious action on this.

This year, the DC-2013 conference [1] is co-locating this year with the
iPres-2013 conference (10th International Conference on Preservation of Digital
Objects) [2].  We ("we" = me, Bernard, and whoever else would like to help
plan) want to take advantage of this co-location to hold a meeting about
vocabulary preservation and the potential role of memory institutions.  I was
amazed to learn just this week that some of the ideas we have been kicking
around for awhile re: mirrored caches and the like [3] were put forward by
Aaron Swartz already in 2002 [4,5].  Given enough awareness and participation,
shouldn't such goals be within our reach in 2014?

[1] http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2013/
[2] http://ipres2013.ist.utl.pt/
[3] http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS10/paper/view/1140/1450
[4] https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00000.html
[5] https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/

> But I also agree with others that this forum is not necessarily the one to
> solve all problems, and certainly not by bringing every other vocabulary
> under the schema.org umbrella. Opening several focused tables of
> conversation is certainly more profitable.
...
> > That parties working on vocabularies designed to be deployed alongside each
> > other, could do the world a favour and talk to each other a bit more.

The DCMI community, meetings, and mailing lists provide one place for such
focused tables of conversation, and if this forum can provide a focal point into
which those discussions can feed into or where they can synchronize with larger
discussions, let's do it.

> > The existence of schema.org
> > should not have a chilling effect on the design, use and deployment of
> > other RDF vocabularies. Even if the schema.org partner companies are
> > not in a position right now to collectively promise to
> > support/understand/use/endorse non-schema.org vocabulary, it is still
> > healthy to have multiple efforts, initiatives and perspectives. (The
> > move towards RDFa Lite is a very positive thing here, btw.)
> 
> Very glad to read that. Diversity is good, but my above suggestions might
> help to clarify who are 'we' to begin with.

+1

> > While good design
> > can help, perhaps even more important is communication.
> 
> Again, triple YES !

Yes indeed!

Tom

-- 
Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 01:57:45 UTC