Re: The Vocabulary, Schema.org governance, etc.

On 9/19/14 1:25 PM, Guha wrote:
> 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 <http://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 <http://schema.org> going down that 
> road!

+1

Others:

Hoping you pick on the deliberate use of "a" rather that "the". In my 
experience, misusing those words, across lots of Semantic Web and 
Ontology related material has lead to nothing but problems.

>
> 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 
> <http://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

In addition, cross referencing across vocabularies that includes 
schema.org is certainly increasing [1][2].

Links:

[1] http://dbpedia.org/c/9CT26GGP -- DBpedia 3.10 (just released in the 
last week or so) cross-referencing schema.org
[2] http://dbpedia.org/c/9DDB4FPM -- DBpedia Ontology
[3] http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/details/vocabulary_dbpedia-owl.html 
-- view from the Linked Open Vocabulary data space .



-- 
Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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