On 6/6/11 3:37 PM, glenn mcdonald wrote:
It seems pretty clear to me that schema.org <http://schema.org> is a
good step for data and humans. It's unlikely to be the end of
anything, and I have my own set of particular issues and regrets**
about it, but it's a potentially huge visibility/credibility boost for
the ideas of structured data and common vocabularies. It's absolutely
telling that it's already dominating discussion at SemTech, despite
the conference being barely started here in SF. And maybe even more
telling that it was done outside of the Semantic Web community. I
think we (the SW "we") should find that embarrassing, not offensive.
glenn
**My top three reservations about schema.org <http://schema.org> in
its initial form:
1. I /really/ wish they'd given Thing an ID, separate from URL. I do
not expect the URLs we get from this to be reliably usable as identifiers.
2. I wish they'd made types for everything, not mixed Things and
"plain" values. But then, people do this in RDF all the time, too. I
think it's one of the signs that the toolset still makes doing the
right thing painful, just as people cram stuff into denormalized
tables because RDBMSes make doing actual relational databases painful.
3. Honestly, I'm still totally not sold on the idea of embedding
structured data in HTML. To scale, this stuff is going to have to be
generated by the underlying data-management tools anyway, at which
point I don't see why it isn't strictly better for everybody to have
HTML for human consumption (unbloated by presentation-irrelevant data
markup) and Data (in whatever serialization) for machine consumption
(uncluttered by presentation markup/contingencies/layout). Even for
Rich Snippets-like purposes this seems like it would be simpler to
devise, produce and consume...
Great summary!
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
