Re: SKOS for schema.org proposal for discussion

Hi all

2013/10/8 Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>

> I guess I missed an earlier conversation about this, but why do folks
> want to import SKOS into schema.org? Can't they just use SKOS as is in
> their HTML using RDFa or Microdata? Is the expectation that putting it
> into schema.org will make it more likely to be used by both Web
> publishers and consumers (crawlers, etc)?
>

I have the same feeling. SKOS was developed to enable migration of library
KOS legacy (thesaurus, classifications) to the Semantic Web, whereas
schema.org has a completely different story and focus, which is making web
content better readable by search engines. Neither protagonists in this
story (Web developers and search engines) are librarians.


> In general I agree with Guha that skos:Concept seems pretty close to
> Resource, or really, schema:Thing.


Representing something as a skos:Concept is just a librarian trick to use
this thing for indexing, classification, search and retrieval etc. Nothing
is a skos:Concept before you look at it with librarian glasses, and if you
put those glasses on, everything can be. Remember endless discussions a
while ago about Michelle Obama being a concept or not. And the way for
example VIAF deals with this is OK in library world, with "authorities"
being represented both as e.g., foaf:Person and skos:Concept, linked by
foaf:focus, see e.g., http://viaf.org/viaf/9847974/rdf.xml

Obviously schema.org does not need to go down those alleys, if you want to
say you speak about a Person you use schema.org/Person and you're done.
What is lacking in schema.org are not SKOS artifacts for librarians, but
ways to indicate topics which do no fall neatly in real-world types
schema.org is typically about, such as cars, books, restaurants ...
Mainly the need is to express things that are "intangible topics", more or
less.

Hence, why not simply define a subclass of schema.org/Intangible called
schema.org/Topic for concepts (so to speak) such as democracy, friendship,
anger, hunger, inflation, disagreement ... which have not yet found a
better place elsewhere in the schema. Maybe at some point will be
introduced schema.org/Feeling or schema.org/EconomicConcept and some of
those "topics" will find a better place.


> For example, if I squint enough,
> schema.org starts looking like a skos:conceptScheme. One of the things
> I liked about schema.org initially was its concreteness.


Indeed, that's why I like Topic which seems more "concrete" than Concept


> There are
> lots of very plain types that people can choose to use without having
> to think too hard about them. I personally don't think giving people
> machinery to start saying abstract things about concepts is going to
> be terribly fruitful.
>

+1

-- 
*Bernard Vatant
*
Vocabularies & Data Engineering
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