Re: Proposal to extend rangeIncludes of DataTypes predicates in schema.org

Hi Martin,
Thanks, I acknowledge your position on this.
BTW I wand to apologise, I misinterpreted your  previous statement when I 
said  "making the xsd datatypes subtypes of  datatypes schema.org". I saw 
you meant the inverse.
Thanks to Jos who pointed out this error.

Kind Regards,

Marc Twagirumukiza | Agfa HealthCare
Senior Clinical Researcher | HE/Advanced Clinical Applications Research
T  +32 3444 8188 | M  +32 499 713 300

http://www.agfahealthcare.com
http://blog.agfahealthcare.com
Click on link to read important disclaimer: 
http://www.agfahealthcare.com/maildisclaimer 



From:   "martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org" 
<martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
To:     Marc Twagirumukiza/AXPZC/AGFA@AGFA
Cc:     sesuncedu@gmail.com, W3C Web Schemas Task Force 
<public-vocabs@w3.org>
Date:   12/11/2014 11:59
Subject:        Re: Proposal to extend rangeIncludes of DataTypes 
predicates in schema.org



Dear Mark:

On 12 Nov 2014, at 10:19, Marc Twagirumukiza <marc.twagirumukiza@agfa.com> 
wrote:

> Hi Folks, 
> This is a nice discussion and may certainly raise several other points 
but let's first see if extending the rangeIncludes of some data type may 
be a way forward. 
> The unique goal here to be "that major search engines tolerate XSD 
dataType information instead of plain strings for schema.org properties in 
RDFa." as Martin discussed. 
> If we could have a consensus on this I can submit a pull request in Git 
repo.Your position? 

As I have tried to express, I am against this proposal, because:

1. it will not have the intended effect and
2. it will cause confusion for average Web developers.

Simply adding XSD datatypes to rangeIncludes axioms will not guarantee 
that the Google validator, and more so, the Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex 
production systems will properly process typed RDFa literals with XSD 
datatypes.

For developers, changing "expected type" information from "Number" to 
"Number OR xsd:integer OR xsd:decimal OR xsd:float OR xsd:double" will 
make things worse, not better.

Also, schema:Number as a range definition does not match a single XSD 
datatype - you would have combine many.

I agree that it would be good if Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex tolerated 
XSD-typed literals in RDFa markup, but I think it is bad to broadly 
encourage developers to do so. Currently, the only ones who face the 
problem you describe are sites that want to publish data for 
Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex AND implement parts of the W3C Semantic Web 
vision. That is a minority. Of the 750 k sites that Guha mentioned, most 
of them are just publishing for major search engines.

Personally, I think that typing literal values at the instance level, as 
in RDF, is a bad idea, and rather a bug than a feature. We should not 
propagate that bug into schema.org.

Martin

PS: The problem with http://schema.org/Boolean is a different one.




On 12 Nov 2014, at 10:19, Marc Twagirumukiza <marc.twagirumukiza@agfa.com> 
wrote:

> Hi Folks, 
> This is a nice discussion and may certainly raise several other points 
but let's first see if extending the rangeIncludes of some data type may 
be a way forward. 
> The unique goal here to be "that major search engines tolerate XSD 
dataType information instead of plain strings for schema.org properties in 
RDFa." as Martin discussed. 
> If we could have a consensus on this I can submit a pull request in Git 
repo.Your position? 
> 
> Kind Regards,
> 
> Marc Twagirumukiza | Agfa HealthCare
> Senior Clinical Researcher | HE/Advanced Clinical Applications Research
> T  +32 3444 8188 | M  +32 499 713 300
> 
> http://www.agfahealthcare.com
> http://blog.agfahealthcare.com
> Click on link to read important disclaimer: 
http://www.agfahealthcare.com/maildisclaimer 
> 
> 
> 
> From:        Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com> 
> To:        martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org 
> Cc:        W3C Web Schemas Task Force <public-vocabs@w3.org>, Marc 
Twagirumukiza/AXPZC/AGFA@AGFA 
> Date:        10/11/2014 17:44 
> Subject:        Re: Proposal to extend rangeIncludes of DataTypes 
predicates in schema.org 
> 
> 
> 
> BLUF: Booleans are hard. Let's go shopping. [1]
> On Nov 10, 2014 5:14 AM, "martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org" 
<martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:
> 
> > The only use-case where I see a need for datatype information attached 
to literal values is when the vocabulary allows multiple datatypes that 
the client could not distinguish automatiocally (e.g. think of a property 
that allows a xsd:string and xsd:boolean - then "True" may be a string or 
a boolean value). But that is a rare exception.
> 
> I am pretty sure that there is a property where this is almost happens, 
though the values are "Yes" or "No", not schema:True or schema:False.
> 
> And after cheating, I see it's legacy for  schema:acceptsReservations! 
> 
> schema:Boolean does not seem to be a true datatype in the way that Text 
is ; it has two instances, schema:True and schema:False. These values are 
described on the schema.org/Boolean page as being "more specific types" , 
but I am pretty sure they are instances (and clicking on the links goes to 
pages that render as instances).
> 
> The place where things might get confused is with Text and URL, since 
these are both literal valued and URL is sub-datatyped from Text.  This 
can occur on eg applicationCategory.
> 
> I believe that in this case a URL will not be recognized as a URL unless 
it is explicitly typed (unless microdata magic applies).
> 
> I expect that the documentation for Boolean could stand to be rewritten 
SMTP style - write the spec to match the implementation. That would give a 
lexical space different from xsd:boolean, and would handle the URI forms 
as constant strings.
> 
> BTW, requiresSubscription has a Boolean range, but does not appear on 
the Boolean page.
> 
> Also, Boolean is not a schema:Enumeration, despite having an enumerated 
set of values.
> 
> Simon
> 
> [1]  http://youtu.be/DzTWF1jVwH4
> 
>