Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism

Very good point. I should have been more clear.


Use of schema.org terms has evolved from only search to many other
applications, both from schema.org sponsors (e.g., Google Now, Cortana) to
non-search companies (Rich Pins from Pinterest). These applications tend to
have narrower domains than search and require more specialized
vocabularies. Many of these more specialized vocabularies, though more
specialized, also tend to include many of the general terms found in
schema.org.

We are simply trying to create a mechanism for the to reuse these terms by
extending schema.org. Of course, they could do their own thing and rely on
webmasters figuring out namespaces, which terms from which namespace, etc.
But experience has shown that webmasters often find that too onerous. This
is an attempt at a solution for that.

And of course, as always, use of vanilla RDFa is always welcome.

Hope this clarifies.

guha

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> wrote:

> 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.
>