Re: schema.org

Lars,

On 6/6/2011 11:51 AM, Lars Heuer wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
>
>> I am running way behind so have yet to catch up on all the traffic about
>> schema.org. Apparently some semantic groups are offended. ;-)
> [...]
>> Any thoughts of how topic map engines can capitalize on this development?
> The ontology has been translated to RDF already [1]. It would be
> trivial to either translate the RDF to Topic Maps or to use the
> scrapers to generate topic maps.
>
> But why should somebody do it? Topic Maps has no market share and it's
> therefor irrelevant in the semantic web and LOD.
>

The market share of topic maps isn't as large as it could be but the 
statement it has "no market share" is simply false.

Topic maps have capabilities, such as merging different vocabularies 
that represent the same subjects, which is highly relevant, particularly 
in an enterprise context.

A paper that I am about to post about on deduplication (what did you 
think merging meant?) can be found at:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/5/5/paper-a-study-of-practical-deduplication.html

True, it is not the hand curated approach that most of us have seen with 
topic maps but that is but one style of topic mapping.

It is also true that not trying will leave topic maps with less than its 
full market share.

What I was thinking about was to take this vocabulary and do mappings to 
existing vocabularies (the RDF ones that you would probably say have "no 
market share") but to other vocabularies as well. Since that is the real 
strength of topic maps. You can have any vocabulary you like and still 
interact with information written using other vocabularies.

> For a website I use mainly RDFa and added some support for schema.org
> but I am not adopting it eagerly.
>
> [...]
>> Perhaps its time for better tools and analysts to take up the task.
> We have already good tools: RDF and SPARQL. :)
>

Yeah, right. Oh, I forgot, they can't distinguish a locator from an 
identifier unless we re-wire the web to produce 303s to cover up TBL's 
original identifier mistake. (BTW, addresses are inherently ambiguous if 
you think about it.)

Which ignores the fact that we have 6,000 years worth of previous 
identifiers and references made using those identifiers.

With a web consciousness measured in days if not hours, I don't suppose 
that really matters.

After all, now we are awake. ;-)

Hope you are at the start of a great week!

Patrick

PS: I don't think topic maps are a universal panacea but on the other 
hand, where quality of information is important, non-duplication of 
effort/capturing institutional knowledge is valuable and resolving 
semantic heterogeneity creates paths into foreign datasets, topic maps 
don't have any real competitors.

Search? You mean having everyone do the same searches, some better, some 
poorer and then spend their time starting at the document level to find 
(maybe) the information they need? What an odd notion you have of 
productive work. Search, after viewing porn, is probably the single 
biggest time sink in the enterprise context.

RDF/Linked Data? Oh, you mean that stuff that all the major search 
engines have ignored in favor of their own system. I can't imagine a 
greater recommendation than that.

Ontologies? You mean like Cyc and SUMO? Both of which have dedicated 
followings that snipe at the other group. And some large 
implementations. In non-trivial contexts. But neither is universal is it?

If you think of topic maps as mapping representatives of the same 
subjects together, such that everyone can use whatever representative 
they want for a particular subject, and yet have the information for 
that subject, gathered under whatever guise, what is there to dislike 
about that?

True, there won't be any "universal" topic map engine that can handle 
any and all identifiers but so what? Remember the dung heap of history 
is piled high with universal semantic proposals. Creating a universal 
topic map engine would be to attempt the same mistake in a different way.




> [1]<https://github.com/mhausenblas/schema-org-rdf>
>
> Best regards,
> Lars

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick-Q/[email protected]
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
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