Re: No death business on the Web ?

While I appreciate that for any item type (whether it be LocalBusiness or
CreativeWork or anything else) it becomes cumbersome to keep adding more
specific types, I don't think a mechanism that replaces the ability to
(sometimes successfully) arbitrarily add a new type with the ability to
arbitrarily add a URI (or, depending on how one looks at, add an arbitrary
URI) helps either publishers or data consumers.

That is to say your sketch looks fine - at least from one vantage point -
if, and only if, there's a well-defined method for adding more specific
classes by referencing an entry on specific domain (here wikidata.org).
 The schema.org extension mechanism as currently constituted is obviously
not such a method.

>From another vantage point I think that using external references to "flesh
out" schema.org classes as the need for more specific classes is
problematic in its own right.  IMO opinion one of the reasons for the
success of schema.org has been the simplicity of the model for web
publishers.  Requiring them to find the correct URI from another specified
source for something that schema.org lacks increasingly requires webmasters
to become taxonomists, one hand decreasing the chance that they'll use the
markup at all, and the other increasing the chance that the data marked up
will be of poor quality due to increased likelihood of errors.

On the flip side, this sort of increased complexity also means that data
consumers are less and less likely to understand the data provided in a
meaningful way.  Google and Bing and Yandex probably have a pretty good
idea of what the more specific types of LocalBusiness are and how to use
them, but that's not going to be the case for a URI from wikidata or
DBpedia or Freebase or wherever.

"We know that it takes time and effort to add this markup to your pages,
and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a
different way." [1]

And much harder (to expand on this note from Google announcing schema.org)
when a webmaster needs not only to know how to produce structured markup
and navigate the schemas represented by schema.org, but also how to
navigate spaces outside schema.org in very specific ways in order to extend
it.  Not to mention that uncertainty about whether or not a data consumer
will use a class increases exponentially in the case of an arbitrary
extension, virtually ensuring that such extensions will be neither built
out uniformly nor widely used.

Again, having said this, a formal mechanism for extending available
subclasses that relies on specific domains goes a long way to bringing
uniformity to such extensions.  But as messy and grating and pokey as the
main transparent method of extending schema.org may be, I think it is
ultimately to the benefit of publishers and data consumers.

[1]
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html



On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 2:02 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:

> On 3 February 2014 21:21, François Scharffe <francois.scharffe@lirmm.fr>
> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I do not find any class for Funeral Homes or Mortuaries in schema.org.
> > Do I miss something ? I would put the class under
> > LocalBusiness->ProfessionalService
>
> At some point we need to say "enough! wikipedia fills out the rest",
> ... these days looking in particular to the wikidata project.
>
> How does this look as a sketch? Expressed here in RDFa,
>
> <div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="ProfessionalService
> http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1466031">
>  <span property="name">Fisher and Sons Funeral Home</span> [...]</span>
> </div>
>
> Dan
>
>