Re: New commerce vocab published

On 10/12/2014 08:53 AM, Stéphane Corlosquet wrote:
> I'm confused between the commerce vocab that you published and Good 
> Relations, and I bet many will get confused like me. Could you add
> something to the spec explaining its relation to GR? Is it competing
> with GR or is it complementary... what's the overlap?

Yep, how the work we're doing here integrates w/ Good Relations is a
common point of confusion. I don't think we've worked out exactly how
the two/three vocabularies will align, except for that there is a desire
there for them to align. We do have a single sentence in the
introduction of the vocab here:

"""
Where GoodRelations provides a means for finding product offerings or
expressing product needs, this vocabulary can be used for the next step:
recording and expressing the commercial transaction.
"""

The spec isn't meant to compete w/ GR (or schema.org), it's meant to be
complementary to schema.org and GR. Ultimately, I think we're going to
re-use as much of schema.org as we can (GR is integrated into it).

At times we may need to subclass GR in schema.org in the commerce
vocabulary because there are technical requirements for some of the
terms that are more specific, but I doubt we'll have to do that much.

For example, Offer and Listing are the same general concept:

Offer: http://schema.org/Offer
Listing: https://web-payments.org/vocabs/payswarm#Listing

but Listing has a bunch of stricter machine-readable requirements. For
example, we need assets (items for sale) to be digitally signed and have
hashes assigned to them to support non-repudiation w/ product offers.
That's important because when a payment processor processes the payment
you don't want the merchant claiming that they never made the offer in
the first place.

I doubt that GR and schema.org are going to want the same restrictions
for their term, so it may be that we keep Listing, or make Listing a
subclass of schema:Offer.

Another example is the expression of currency. schema:priceCurrency says
to use an ISO currency code, the Web Payments stuff says to use a URL so
that organizations can mint new currencies. The latter enables small
communities to launch their own non-official currencies (within the laws
of their country).

I've added a section to the vocabulary document in an attempt to explain
this in more detail:

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/vocabs/commerce.html#relationship-to-good-relations-and-schema.org

commit is here:

https://github.com/web-payments/web-payments.org/commit/9d568fc00bfaa11b3b3c24c11fcadd1ea264c1b3

Thanks for the feedback, Stéphane! :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Sunday, 12 October 2014 13:44:01 UTC