Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism

Hi Guha, everyone...

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Guha <guha@google.com> wrote:
> For
> something to go into the core, it not only has to meet the quality bar, but
> also be of general interest to a substantial fraction of the internet
> community. This second condition does not hold for reviewed extensions.

This is a very interesting statement to me. It's certainly possible
that I'm missing the point here, as although I've been interested and
supportive of (and written code to support) the schema.org effort,
I've only recently joined this list. But it's been my understanding
since it was first announced that the value here is basically a
(potentially temporary) trade-off of decentralized evolvability for
ease/speed of deployment. So the search engines basically say via
schema.org, "Here's some general terms that we understand", and
publishers down-convert their content from vertical-specific terms to
those more general terms.

The motivation in the current proposal states, "As schema.org adoption
has grown, a number groups with more specialized vocabularies have
expressed interest in extending schema.org with their terms". I don't
doubt that's true, but as we all know, the driving force that makes
the schema.org proposition valuable isn't from "groups", it's the
search engines and their support of those general terms. As the terms
become more and more specific, of interest to smaller and smaller
communities, and therefore of less interest to search engines to
support, that value evaporates AFAICT.

So I really wonder what the benefit is here. For those communities
with vocabularies of a less general nature, why not just publish with
vanilla RDFa? What value is there to be hitched to schema.org in the
way described in this document?

Thanks.

Mark.

Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2015 19:35:54 UTC