Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism

Hi all

I was unsubscribed for a while from this list (too noisy) but I came back
just for this conversation about strings/codes vs URIs.
We had lately in the Linked Open Vocabularies forum a small discussion [1]
on whether to use in metadata of vocabularies either of the following

my:vocab  dc:language  "de"
my:vocab   dcterms:language  <my-favourite-URI-for-German-goes-here>

My point, along the lines Martin has defended, is that "de" as value of
dc:language is certainly more interoperable and widely understood than any
URI forged on this code. Granted, this flies in the face of the linked data
1st Commandment "Thou shalt name things with URIs", and in the quoted
discussions the consensus was more or less : well, use both and everybody
is happy.

That said, in the case of ISO country and language codes, the story is as
old at least as the century, since in the Topic Maps community, well before
linked data was on the air, back in 2001, we introduced the notion of
"Published Subjects Identifiers" (read, documented URI), with the clear
understanding that it was up to standard bodies to take the initiative to
publish standard URIs under their own authoritative namespace. Since they
did not, came the proliferation of proxy URIs for those codes. I plead
guilty as charged since I coined some back in 2007 [3]. And when came URIs
produced closer to the standard bodies, like by Library of Congress [4], it
was too late the did was done and courtesy of owl:sameAs you get semantic
black holes such as [5].

So, please please don't coin yet another set of URIs for those under
schema.org, unless you want to feed the said black holes a bit more, but
for each property of which value might use a standard, please recommend
- to use a *standard string* as when the purpose is just to* identify* the
country (or whatever with a standard code) in a property/value pair.
- to use whatever URI when you want to point at a *specific description* of
the country.

My Friday 2 cents




[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BernardVatant/posts/LQiscfkCZY9
[2] http://psi.oasis-open.org/iso/3166/
[3] http://lingvoj.org
[4] http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/countries.html
[5] sameas.org/html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FAustralia

2015-03-27 11:52 GMT+01:00 McBennett, Pat <McBennettP@dnb.com>:

> Thanks Jim!
>
>
>
> I was thinking I only need country identifiers for the moment (and not
> machine readable content when the URI is dereferenced), so using ‘
> https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:XX’ to identify countries in my
> datasets might very well be good enough.
>
>
>
> I’ll reply separately to Martin’s fantastic response(s), but basically I’m
> sensing an opportunity here for Schema.org extensions to possibly fill a
> gap between the existing standards (like ISO, or the United Nations) and
> the Linked Data need for ‘authoritative’ reference data in RDF (like
> country identifiers for starters). If that gap could be filled, CEDS
> wouldn’t need https://ceds.ed.gov/element/000050 anymore (except maybe to
> say ‘owl:sameAs iso:Country’), and it wouldn’t need to put the work into
> returning detailed RDF from that URI either (nor worry about keeping it’s
> identifiers in-sync with a more widely recognised ‘authority’).
>
>
>
> Thanks again, Pat.
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Jim Goodell [mailto:jimgoodell@qi-partners.com]
> *Sent:* 26 March 2015 17:39
> *To:* McBennett, Pat; public-vocabs@w3.org
> *Subject:* Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism
>
>
>
> Pat,
>
>
>
> CEDS has a URI reference for the ISO 2-digit codes, e.g.
> https://ceds.ed.gov/element/000050#IE for Ireland.
>
> It does not (yet) have an element defining the ISO 3-digit country codes,
> and the URL when resolved does not (yet) return machine readable content
> such as RDF.
>
>
>
> I think the the code could be referenced ‘authoritatively’ using the ISO
> site like this: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:IE  I guess it
> depends whether you just need an identifier or if you need the definition
> returned in a machine readable format when the URI is resolve.
>
>
>
> jim
>
>
>
> *From: *"McBennett, Pat" <McBennettP@DNB.com>
> *Date: *Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 1:04 PM
> *To: *"public-vocabs@w3.org" <public-vocabs@w3.org>
> *Subject: *Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism
> *Resent-From: *<public-vocabs@w3.org>
> *Resent-Date: *Thu, 26 Mar 2015 17:05:33 +0000
>
>
>
> I totally agree with Martin Hepp’s comments. I’ve recently begun exactly
> the process Martin describes (i.e. defining ‘Web ontologies / shared
> schemas’), and already I’m finding all 3 of his points are spot-on.
>
>
>
> But I’d like to ask Martin – what form of mechanism does he think could
> work for ‘…tapping into the potential of the many, many interesting schemas
> and standards out there […] without the need to channel those through the
> social and technical process of getting into schema.org core’?
>
>
>
> As a very simple example – I’m currently trying to find an existing RDF
> schema or standard for International Country Codes, but one which is
> ‘authoritative’. ISO was an obvious place to start, so I asked them if they
> could provide these codes as RDF (I can that they currently provide them as
> CSV, XML or XLS [1]). Their response:
>
>
>
> Dear Pat,
>
>
>
> We do not product any RDF formats, I am sorry.
>
>
>
> Regards
>
>
>
> So that means although there are ISO country codes in the public domain
> (e.g. IRL, or FRA, or USA), and of course I can use those codes freely,
> there are no ‘official’ URI’s out there for those codes (that I’m aware of)
> – i.e. there is no ‘http://www.iso.org/country/alpha-3/IRL’ for Ireland.
> So unless I can presuade the ISO to mint these URI’s for ‘their’ country
> codes (which I would see as ideal, since they are a recognised authority,
> but it seems unlikely in the sort term), what mechanism do I have to use
> standardised, authoritative (i.e. as opposed to crowdsourced Wikipedia (or
> DBPedia) URI identifiers for countries in my internal datasets? I could
> mint my own URI’s for these country codes under my companies domain name,
> but that’s hardly appropriate as we’ve no interest in being an authority on
> country code identifiers (and we’d have the maintanance overhead of trying
> to keep them in-sync with the ‘real’ ISO codes)…
>
>
>
> Which is why I would have thought an extension to Schema.org might offer a
> good opportunity for this (since Schema.org has already become the de facto
> authority for lots of things!). But am I just being naïve somehow…?
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Pat.
>
>
>
>
>
> [1] - http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> [image: cid:image001.png@01D05044.5C2AEE60]
>
>
>
> *Pat McBennett*
>
> Architect
>
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-- 

*Bernard Vatant*
Vocabularies & Data Engineering
Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
Skype : bernard.vatant
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