RE: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

On Friday, May 02, 2014 10:38 PM, martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org wrote:
> 3. Most people I speak to basically say that for their production sites,
they do only what is
> specifified in schema.org. Unless the sponsors of schema.org explicitly
endorse the use of a
> certain external vocabulary, this will not have a big adoption, IMO.
Adding the proposed
> elements to schema.org in contrast will make it much easier to convince
owners of this
> valuable data to make it available for search engines and other clients.

I think this is actually the most important point. The Semantic Web was
around for a very long time but adoption was extremely slow. IMHO the main
reason it starts to take off is because the Schema.org partners give people
very clear and valuable incentives. The nicely formatted search results that
people get in return for marking up their data increases the CTR and thus
not only provides value to the consumer of the data, but also to the
publisher of the data.

While I like the general idea and see some value, I'm very skeptical that
people will invest in this if there are no clear incentives to do so. You
name a few *potential* benefits/use cases but I have to say they do not
convince me. There are already hundreds of concepts defined by schema.org,
yet only a very small fraction of them results in concrete benefits for the
data *provider*. What's the motivation for them to use this approach? I bet
it would be much easier to convince them to, e.g., publish their data as
plain-old JSON instead (not JSON-LD). That's extremely cheap and every
programmer is familiar with it. You also get more or less the same benefits,
i.e., structured data that you claim is easier to interpret than completely
unstructured, natural language. So why not just embed JSON blocks. In most
programming//templating languages that wouldn't require more than one line
of code.


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Sunday, 4 May 2014 08:29:23 UTC