Re: Ease of adoption

What I've been looking for is an interface that allows a "web monkey" or home user to do this…in book files. To mark up ebooks semantically, and have search engines ingest the files in their indexes, would be a huge leap forward. It would help search, it would help books, it would help society as a whole.

But we are missing three things in that: the Wordpress-y like interface that would allow this; the ability for an epub or mobi file to handle this markup without breaking; and the willingness of the book market to experiment. (To wit: Authors Guild lawsuit against Google Books regarding indexing and abstracting. Walled garden ebook environments. Etc.)

From: Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com<mailto:wes.turner@gmail.com>>
Date: Monday, July 29, 2013 12:33 PM
To: Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org<mailto:martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>>
Cc: Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com<mailto:dave.pawson@gmail.com>>, "public-vocabs@w3.org<mailto:public-vocabs@w3.org>" <public-vocabs@w3.org<mailto:public-vocabs@w3.org>>, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com<mailto:danbri@google.com>>
Subject: Re: Ease of adoption
Resent-From: <public-vocabs@w3.org<mailto:public-vocabs@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Monday, July 29, 2013 12:34 PM


+1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org

On Jul 29, 2013 10:46 AM, "Martin Hepp" <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org<mailto:martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>> wrote:
Here is my suggestion for a new intro:

"Many individuals and organizations use the Web to articulate their messages: companies offer products, newspapers present news, bloggers share opinions, etc.
Historically, the most relevant audience for a Web site were humans - they found your Web site via a search engine and then consumed the information from your site directly in their Web browsers.

Now, there are more and more digital devices between a Web site and its target audience, and they cover a bigger share of the process of using information from the Web. For instance, nowadays, the most relevant results in a search engine are often not "main" pages, but deep, detailed links into a Web site.

As a consequence, the decision for or against a product, restaurant, newspaper, etc., -- in other words: your offer --, is made already in the search results returned by the Web search engine. The better the search engine understands the information inside your pages, the better it can select, summarize, and present it to the target audiences.

Schema.org is a standard for marking-up the information in your Web content in a way that search engines and other computer-based services can understand. In database terminology, the structures used to represent information as data are called a "schema". Schema.org defines a common schema for the interface between your Web content and search engines. It allows search engines and other services to better extract and understand your site.

Why bother? Site owners spend a lot of effort for optimizing the user experience of their site for human visitors, with stylesheets, icons, font choices, etc. Schema.org is the next step: Optimizing the user experience for your site when it is presented to your target audience by a search engine, a mobile application, a browser extension, or any new digital intermediary that may be in between."

Best

Martin Hepp

PS: I offer this text under Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 ;-)

On Jul 29, 2013, at 5:17 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:

> On 29 July 2013 15:23, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com<mailto:wes.turner@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 29, 2013 3:53 AM, "Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com<mailto:dave.pawson@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Reading http://schema.org/docs/gs.html (IMHO) I don't see the salesmans
>>> version,
>>> a trainers view of the ideas behind schema.org<http://schema.org>.
>>>
>>> Has anyone started to think of how a web monkey or home user might be
>>> persuaded
>>> to adopt microdata for their own usage?  E.g. taking the user perspective?
>>> Dan and others may well find their way round schema.org<http://schema.org>, but it isn't so
>>> easy
>>> to get started when a new user comes across it?
>>
>> When you say "taking the user perspective", what exactly do you mean by
>> that? How are you suggesting the pitch should be modified in order to reach
>> the target audience?
>
> IMHO that says it, succinctly and for a knowledgeable audience.
>  If you look at intro type books (dummys ... etc), there is much more
> of a sell there. Persuasion as to why this tech is useful for them,
> meets an objective the reader may have?
>
> E.g. "A collection of schemas"... WTF is a schema...?
>
> " html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways
> recognized by major search providers."
>  Oh - that's not me then, I'm not a webmaster...
>
> I.e just the slant?
>
> Does that make sense?
>
> regards DaveP
>
>
>>
>> schema.org<http://schema.org> has a fairly great description:
>>
>> """
>> What is Schema.org?
>> This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters
>> can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.
>> Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup
>> to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to
>> find the right web pages.
>> Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in
>> databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult
>> to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially
>> search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured
>> data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on
>> web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for
>> users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new
>> tools and applications that make use of the structure.
>> A shared markup vocabulary makes it easier for webmasters to decide on a
>> markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the
>> spirit of sitemaps.org<http://sitemaps.org>, search engines have come together to provide a
>> shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.
>> """
>>
>> schema.org/docs/gs.html<http://schema.org/docs/gs.html> has the following heading structure:
>>
>> Getting started with schema.org<http://schema.org>
>> * How to mark up your content using Microdata
>>   * Why use Microdata? [what about RDFa, these days]
>> * Using the schema.org<http://schema.org> vocabulary
>> * Advanced-topic: machine-understandable versions of information
>>
>>> The other side of this is the breadth of options? How might the
>>> increasingly large
>>> number of terms be 'filtered' for use by  the man in the street to
>>> optimise his/her
>>> chances of a search engine result?
>>>
>>> I think this aspect could and should be given consideration as the size of
>>> the main term set increases.
>>>
>>> Just a thought. Is there work being done in this area?
>>
>> There is a fair amount of research regarding meta tag stuffing in regards to
>> SEO.
>>
>>>
>>> regards
>>>
>>> --
>>> Dave Pawson
>>> XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
>>> Docbook FAQ.
>>> http://www.dpawson.co.uk
>>>
>>
>> IMHO, from an en-US perspective, the copy text for the schema.org<http://schema.org> Ontology:
>>
>> * is fairly verbose
>> * could have a few more bullet points
>> * could be updated to reference the supported formats
>>  (RDF/XML, Turtle, JSON-LD, N3, NTriples, HTML5 Microdata, and *RDFa*)
>> * could more directly allude to schema.rdfs.org<http://schema.rdfs.org> and
>> http://schema.rdfs.org/tools.html
>> * could link to topical Wikipedia pages
>>
>> Wikipedia pages
>>
>> * /Linked_data
>> * /Semantic_web
>> * /Microdata_(HTML)
>>
>> I collected a number of Wikipedia links that may be useful for, as you put
>> it, teh "web monkey and home user" here:
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/semanticweb/comments/1dvakc/schemaorgdataset_standard_schema_for_linked_data/
>>
>> Please feel free to share and incorporate this research.
>
>
>
> --
> Dave Pawson
> XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
> Docbook FAQ.
> http://www.dpawson.co.uk
>

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

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