Re: No death business on the Web ?

I think that the best way to standardize URIs for additional types is that the respective communities try to use them consistently. It is not necessary or even not possible for the search engines to govern the standardization of additional types on the long tail. If a certain type is commonly used, search engines will learn to aggregate and process data on the basis of this type. Standardization inside schema.org is neither sufficient not necessary to define which types are to be used. In the end, the data on the Web determines which types can be usefully tied to computational operations over the data.

Martin

On Feb 3, 2014, at 11:57 PM, Aaron Bradley wrote:

> 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
> 
> 

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

e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp 
twitter: mfhepp

Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================
* Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2014 13:17:13 UTC