Re: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

On 4/30/14, 7:57 PM, Aaron Bradley wrote:

>
> 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?

I'm not Jason, but coming from the library world there is work afoot to 
create a general encoding mechanism for some of the technical details in 
library data -- mainly the physical description of materials. This is 
turning out to be:

Aspect: what you are talking about, e.g. height
Unit: what unit of measure you are using
Value: the actual value

These correspond well to Martin's
name
unitText
value

Here are examples from the documentation:


Aspect: extent/number of subunits
Unit: pages
Quantity: 245

Aspect: height
Unit: centimeters
Quantity: 23

Being a kind of closed space, library data can control the values for 
"Unit" but I do like the idea of being able to include a unit code, so I 
may demonstrate this to the group that is considering this standard.

All that to say that this could be useful for CreativeWorks, but from 
what I can tell CW could borrow this from Product if desired.

kc

>
> 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 <http://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 <http://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
> <mailto:martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
> <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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 <http://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 <http://bestbuy.com> Product Recommendations, Product
>     Ontology Platforms
>      >
>      >
>      > ________________________________________
>      > From: martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
>     <mailto:martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
>     <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
>     <mailto: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
>     <http://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
>
>
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2014 15:28:03 UTC