Re: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

I like the direction of this proposal very much:  in general this has the
potential to extend the potential expressiveness of schema.org a leap
forward with a single step.  A few points on what's been said so far.

As Holger Knublauch said I believe we should not mix up a discussion about
a data model with the current set of syntaxes, and like Martin I think it's
important this work with microdata.  Forcing webmasters who want to avail
themselves of this mechanism that have otherwise cast their lot with
microdata to mix-and-match with RDFa or JSON-LD is an onerous adoption
killer, and heaping on syntaxes will certainly ensure an increase in code
errors.

While the genesis of this idea was product description, I see no reason
whatsoever why this should be restricted to Product, Place or any other
specific type.  Thad, I believe you first brought this up:  was there
something in the Freebase experience informs your opinion on this?  Or a
reason from your end Jason?

It seems to be that one of the chief benefits of a generic property
declaration mechanism is that its, well, generic.  If this were to roll
out, webmasters (myself included) will immediately find themselves lacking
in a very useful property, see a means of adding it, but be frustrated in
the attempt by the limitation on applicable types.  And the ready
extensibility provided by this makes it conducive to the generation of
useful extensions, necessarily lost in the revised proposal limiting
additionalProperty's use (literally crossed out).  Given the usefulness of
this, what's the compelling argument to limit its use?

Justin Boyan
>Can you give some examples of how this style of data could be used by a
search engine or aggregator to drive interesting features? It seems like
it's pushing too much work to the consumer side. Every different
website/producer will come up with their own different terminology for the
same attributes, which sort of defeats the purpose of a common vocabulary.

My only misgiving is along these lines - that by providing for the ad hoc
addition of new properties, we're diminishing the value of
*shared*vocabulary that multiple data consumers understand.  But I
think valuable
extensions will end up being broad understood and/or incorporated into the
core.  And more to the point, data consumers and publishers are already
extending schema.org with new properties on a regular basis, as with
Google's financialQuote properties or OCLC's exampleOfWork.  Which I think
is fine, but are such ad hoc methods of adding properties preferable to
using this proposed method of exposing property/value pairs?

Jay Myers
>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.

Great to have your input Jay, and yes, I'd love to see further details!



On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 6:47 PM, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org <
martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> Dear Jay:
> Thanks for your +1!
> I just updated the proposal and now constrain the core property
> additionalProperty to Product OR Place.
>
> Martin
>
> On 01 May 2014, at 03:44, Myers, Jay <Jay.Myers@bestbuy.com> wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>
>