Re: Schema.org considered helpful

* Harry Halpin wrote:
>I've been watching the community response to schema.org for the last
>bit of time. Overall, I think we should clarify why people are upset.
>First, there should be no reason to be upset that the major search
>engines went off and created their own vocabularies. According to the
>argument of decentralized extensibility, schema.org *exactly* what
>Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft are supposed to be doing. It's a
>straightfoward site that clearly for how the average Web developer can
>use structured data in markup to solve real-world use-cases and
>provides examples.  That's the entire vision of the Semantic Web, let
>a thousand ontologies bloom with no central control.

What other technologies do people typically use when making their web
sites that are under the control of three american corporations, one of
which has over 90% market share in the main relevant domain, where no
alternatives are available? I can't really think of any example, which
suggests to me that there is indeed something wrong here.

>The reason people are upset are that they didn't use RDFa, but instead
>used microdata. One *cannot* argue that Google is ignoring open
>standards. RDFa and microdata are *both* Last Call W3C Working Drafts
>now. RDFa 1.0 is a spec but only for XHTML 1.0, which is not what most
>of the Web uses. Microdata does have RDF parsing bugs, but again, most
>developers outside the Semantic Web probably don't care - they want
>JSON anyways.

Some of us recognize that "RDFa" was developed by a community that does
not understand HTML very well, and "microdata" by a community that does
not understand meta data very well, with the two groups being more con-
cerned with winning arguments than collaborating on problem solving; and
don't like the result, or the individual competing proposals, very much.

>The fact of the matter is that the Semantic Web academic community has
>had their priorities skewed to the wrong direction. Had folks been
>spending time doing usability testing and focussing on user-feedback
>on common problems (such as the rather obvious "vocabulary hosting"
>problem) rather than focussing on things with little to no support
>with the world outside academia, then we probably would not be in the
>situation we are in today.

That's interesting. Was there anybody who pointed this out at the time?
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Received on Friday, 17 June 2011 02:39:31 UTC