Re: Facebook's Open Graph Protocol

On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:18:04 +1000
Renato Iannella <renato@nicta.com.au> wrote:

> Disappointing in that they ignore the past and "reinvent" a new
> namespace for already well established semantics....

It's not difficult to pick holes in the OGP schema, but I think it's
more important to support the idea overall. The bigger point is that
they chose to reuse RDF rather than inventing their own proprietary
markup. Given that choice, you can use off-the-shelf reasoning tools to
map OGP's schema to whatever other vocabs you like. If they hadn't used
RDF, that would be a whole lot harder.

Besides which, most OGP properties don't have drop-in replacements in
existing vocabs. For example the following triple:

  <> og:region ?place .

Is not really equivalent to:

  <> foaf:based_near ?place .

But is closer to:

  <> foaf:primaryTopic [foaf:based_near [rdfs:label ?place]] .

If they'd reused existing vocabs, they probably wouldn't have been able
to keep their data structure as flat as it is. This flat schema may
prove important for adoption.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Tuesday, 27 April 2010 16:59:36 UTC