Re: Facebook's Open Graph Protocol

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 3:06 AM, Renato Iannella <renato@nicta.com.au>wrote:

>
> On 28 Apr 2010, at 02:57, Toby Inkster wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I think you nailed it on the head here Toby.
>
> There is a "reluctance" to reuse existing vocabs for the desire to have a
> "flat" structure (one namespace).


That was certainly a major consideration. But there's another sense of
'flat' that Toby perhaps had in mind: they didn't really get into RDF-based
modelling, and if you look at it as RDF, you see assertions that technically
are about a page. So the page has a 'director', or a 'cuisine'. This is
quite simple markup, but is hard to map (even with latest OWL) to other
vocabs that talk about 'director' of a movie, 'cuisine' of an
EatingOrientedFoodVendageEstablishment or whatever.

As the one who helped persuade them to use RDFa, I did try to also get a
more RDFish model adopted, and suggested a schema with mappings (to vcard
and foaf and portable contacts and dbpedia, ...). This simply wasn't
possible on last week's schedule, but I'm following up and will keep you
posted...

cheers,

Dan