Re: 2014 Sports Proposal - V3

Thanks Bernard:

Your message got me to thinking as to just what the target of
schema.org is.

You say "what makes certainly for 99% of online information about
sports likely to be marked with schema.org : popular sports competitions
involving popular teams, e.g., World Cup, Olympic Games, NBA, Tour de France
etc."  I think that this is very wrong.

As far as I can see, the target of schema.org is neither FIFA, nor the IOC,
nor the NBA, nor Apple, nor Amazon, nor EBay, nor Justin Bieber, nor Ryan
Braun.  It's not Manchester United, nor the Green Bay Packers, nor even
Leicester City F. C. or Diana Ross.  If 99% of schema.org markup relates to
these organizations, then I would say that schema.org is a complete and
utter failure.  These organizations don't need schema.org.  Much information
about them is aleady available in nice machine-digestable formats, and the
reasons that the rest isn't have nothing to do with anything that schema.org
provides.

So what is the target of schema.org?

It is the other organizations and activities, particularly those at the
bottom.  The prime target of schema.org is local businesses, small eBay
sellers, struggling musicians, and amateur sports organizations and
teams like the junior rugby team that my colleague coaches.  It is these
organizations that need easier ways of getting their information available
in a machine-digestable format.  A secondary target of schema.org is
not-quite-so-small businesses, larger eBay sellers, and small sports teams
like Burscough F.C.  These organizations could publish their information in
a nice machine-digestable format without schema.org, but haven't chosen to
do so, perhaps because they don't have the expertise or perhaps because they
don't believe that the benefits outweigh the costs.



Given that I feel that data about important, or at least popular, is readily
available, when then am I so often frustrated when I search for computer
products from major manufacturers or try to find answers to questions about
computing?  That's a good question, but it's unrelated to whether the data
is readily available, and I don't see schema.org as having any significant
impact here, at least in its present form.

peter

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2014 13:49:57 UTC