RE: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

All,

I am still catching up on all the threads in this discussion, but wanted to add my perspective as a publisher of large amount of product data...

I'm encouraged to see this proposal move forward -- we have used similar techniques on our RDF/ SPARQL platform to expose deep attribute sets, with excellent results that enable discovery and exploration of long tail products. I can provide further details if people are interested. I would imagine that enabling the same functionality in schema.org would open up many possibilities to enrich product search and discovery through the search engines.

>From experience we realized it would take endless numbers of human hours to grok, organize, and standardize properties for every product category -- even our relatively small(ish) catalog consisting of 700K products with around 1110 product categories. I can also say that no site owner or developer is going to go through the trouble of mapping their product data to an external set of mappings. However, this data has tremendous value and I believe Martin's proposal can unearth that, allowing consumption by machines which should be able to easily synthesize it if need be. 

+1 Thad's idea of keeping at the Product level.


---
Jay Myers
Product Manager/ Architect
bestbuy.com Product Recommendations, Product Ontology Platforms


________________________________________
From: martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:16 PM
To: Mike Bergman
Cc: W3C Web Schemas Task Force
Subject: Re: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

> Are you saying there are legal restrictions to create mapping files between industry standards (some of which may be proprietary) and internal vocabularies? Are there any restrictions to publicly releasing such mappings?
>
> If these are allowable, then "hosting" the native vocabularies is immaterial.
>
> My understanding of the answer to these two questions is NO.  But, I only play a lawyer on TV.
>


I was saying that publishing an OWL vocabulary containing at least class and property labels that is directly derived from an existing classification standard requires a license from the owner of the intellectual property. That means that unless you can motivate the standards body to publish a Web ontology version of its classes and properties, it is very difficult to use that standard for structured data on the Web. I am no lawyer and can thus not assess whether collections of identifiers alone are subject to IPR, but in general, this is a non-trivial issue.

For instance, I have been trying to get legal approval from the UN from 2004 - 2007 to publish my OWL variant of www.unspsc.org on the Web, or for them to host my OWL versions on their server, and eventually gave up.

For eClass, we developed a proper OWL transformation, but since eClass lives from membership fees for accessing the full standard, they could eventually not agree to publishing the OWL version on the Web after the 5.1 version (for which they had given me permission).

And the story goes on.

With my proposal, you can immediately use the local identifiers for any of the properties from eClass, GPC, etc. for exposing product feature


Best
Martin

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2014 01:45:33 UTC