On 11 Jun 2011, at 21:21, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
> will you be posting this as a FAQ i think its definitely worth it.

Good idea, thanks. Some of the answers are now here:
http://schema.rdfs.org/faq.html

Richard



> 
> Gio
> 
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 6:55 PM, Richard Cyganiak <[email protected]> wrote:
>> All,
>> 
>> Thanks for the thoughtful feedback regarding schema.rdfs.org, both here and 
>> off-list.
>> 
>> This is a collective response to various arguments brought up. I'll 
>> paraphrase the arguments.
>> 
>>> Limiting ranges of properties to strings is bad because we LD people might 
>>> want to use URIs or blank nodes there.
>> 
>> Schema.org says the range is a string, and the RDFS translation reflects 
>> this. We tried to formally describe schema.org in RDFS. We did not try to 
>> make a fork that improves upon their modelling. That might be a worthwhile 
>> project too, but a different project.
>> 
>>> Schema.org documentation explicitly say that you can use a text instead of 
>>> a Thing/Person/other type.
>> 
>> This is the opposite case from the one above: They say that in place of a 
>> resource, you can always use a text. That's ok—we didn't say that 
>> schema:Thing is disjoint from literals. (I'm tempted to add “xsd:string 
>> rdfs:subClassOf schema:Thing.” to capture this bit of the schema.org 
>> documentation.)
>> 
>>> The range should use rdfs:Literal instead of xsd:string to allow language 
>>> tags.
>> 
>> That's a good point. The problem is that xsd:string is too narrow and 
>> rdfs:Literal is too broad. RDF 1.1 is likely to define a class of all string 
>> literals (tagged and untagged), we'll use that when its name has been 
>> settled, and perhaps just leave the inaccurate xsd:string in place for now.
>> 
>>> You should use owl:allValuesFrom instead of the union domains/ranges.
>> 
>> Probably correct in terms of good OWL modelling. But the current modelling 
>> is not wrong AFAICT, and it's nicer to use the same construct for single- 
>> and multi-type domains and ranges.
>> 
>>> Nothing is gained from the range assertions. They should be dropped.
>> 
>> They capture a part of the schema.org documentation: the “expected type” of 
>> each property. That part of the documentation would be lost. Conversely, 
>> nothing is gained by dropping them.
>> 
>>> You should jiggle where rdfs:isDefinedBy points to, or use wdrs:describedby.
>> 
>> 
>> This could probably be done better, but the way we currently do it is 
>> simple, and not wrong, so we're a bit reluctant to change it.
>> 
>>> You're missing an owl:Class type on the anonymous union classes.
>> 
>> Good catch, fixed. Thanks Holger!
>> 
>>> You should add owl:FunctionalProperty for all single-valued properties.
>> 
>> The schema.org documentation unfortunately doesn't talk about the 
>> cardinality of properties. Using heuristics to determine which properties 
>> could be functional seems a bit risky, given that it's easy to shoot oneself 
>> in the foot with owl:FunctionalProperty.
>> 
>>> There are UTF-8 encoding problems in comments.
>> 
>> Fixed. Thanks Aidan!
>> 
>>> You should mint new URIs and use http://schema.rdfs.org/Thing instead of 
>>> http://schema.org/Thing.
>> 
>> 
>> Schema.org defines URIs for a set of useful vocabulary terms. The nice thing 
>> about it is that the URIs have Google backing. The Google backing would be 
>> lost by forking with a different set of URIs.
>> 
>>> You should mint new URIs because the schema.org URIs don't resolve to RDF.
>> 
>> 
>> Dereferenceability is only a means to an end: establishing identifiers that 
>> are widely understood as denoting a particular thing. Let's acknowledge 
>> reality: Google-backed URIs with HTML-only documentation achieve this better 
>> than researcher-backed URIs which follow best practices to a tee with a 
>> cherry on top.
>> 
>>> You are violating httpRange-14 because you say that http://schema.org/Thing 
>>> is a class, while it clearly is an information resource.
>> 
>> Schema.org documentation uses these URIs as classes and properties in RDFa. 
>> They also return 200 from those URIs. So it's them who are violating 
>> httpRange-14, not us. Draw your own conclusion about the viability of 
>> httpRange-14.
>> 
>>> You should use http://schema.org/Thing#this.
>> 
>> 
>> Schema.org is using http://schema.org/Thing as a class in their RDFa 
>> documentation. I don't think we should mint different URIs in their 
>> namespace.
>> 
>>> http://schema.org/Person is not the same as foaf:Person; one is a class of 
>>> documents, the other the class of people.
>> 
>> I don't think that's correct at all. http://schema.org/Person is the class 
>> of people and is equivalent to foaf:Person. It's just that the schema.org 
>> designers don't seem to care much about the distinction between information 
>> resources and angels and pinheads. This is the prevalent attitude outside of 
>> this mailing list and we should come to terms with this.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Richard
>> 
> 


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