The Vocabulary, Schema.org governance, etc.

First, a heartfelt thanks for caring and being so passionate about this. I
am really happy that we are having an open discussion about these matters.
In that spirit, here are a few comments.

Schema.org does not claim or want to be *the* general web vocabulary. It is
simply a vocabulary, that a set of groups within four large consumers of
structured data on the web agree upon. I helped start schema.org because
the fragmentation of vocabularies and confusion amongst webmasters was
severely holding back adoption inside Google (Bing, Yahoo, Yandex) and
consequently amongst webmasters. We figured that agreeing on the small
subset of vocabulary that mattered to us would improve things a lot. It
does seem to be working, but we constantly have to keep our focus and not
stray into areas that are not of short/medium term focus for our companies.
Indeed, we constantly find ourselves pulling back from more specialized
areas. Having tried to build a "the" vocabulary once in Cyc, I am very wary
of schema.org going down that road!

Schema.org is evolving not just in its vocabulary, but also in its
governance model. We solicit and accept input from the broad community both
on vocabulary and on other issues. In fact, the recent change in our TOS
was motivated by issues raised by the community. I fully expect that there
will be a number of further changes in the years to come.

Given the nature of web search and the effort expended by various 'search
engine optimizers' in gaming search algorithms, we are unfortunately unable
to discuss the details of our data processing. We welcome other consumers
of this data and maybe some of them can be more explicit about how they use
the data. I am very hopeful that there will be academic research projects
that consume schema.org data in new applications. That will pave the path
towards a well understood, documented model for consuming this data.

We encourage the creation of many vocabularies. We would love for there to
be other vocabularies that get lots of adoption and as these vocabularies
get adoption, the search engines will use them.

Thank you for being so understanding of our situation.

Guha