Vocabularies at W3C by Phil Archer.
From the post:
In my opening post on this blog I hinted that another would follow concerning vocabularies. Here it is.
When the Semantic Web first began, the expectation was that people would create their own vocabularies/schemas as required – it was all part of the open world (free love, do what you feel, dude) Zeitgeist. Over time, however, and with the benefit of a large measure of hindsight, it’s become clear that this is not what’s required.
The success of Linked Open Vocabularies as a central information point about vocabularies is symptomatic of a need, or at least a desire, for an authoritative reference point to aid the encoding and publication of data. This need/desire is expressed even more forcefully in the rapid success and adoption of schema.org. The large and growing set of terms in the schema.org namespace includes many established terms defined elsewhere, such as in vCard, FOAF, Good Relations and rNews. I’m delighted that Dan Brickley has indicated that schema.org will reference what one might call ‘source vocabularies’ in the near future, I hope with assertions like
owl:equivalentClass,owl:equivalentPropertyetc.Designed and promoted as a means of helping search engines make sense of unstructured data (i.e. text), schema.org terms are being adopted in other contexts, for example in the ADMS. The Data Activity supports the schema.org effort as an important component and we’re delighted that the partners (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Yandex) develop the vocabulary through the Web Schemas Task Force, part of the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group of which Dan Brickley is chair.
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Phil then makes a pitch for doing vocabulary work at the W3C but you can see his post for the details.
I think the success of schema.org is a flashing pointer to a semantic sweet spot.
It isn’t nearly everything that you could do with RDF/OWL or with topic maps, but it’s enough to show immediate ROI for a minimum of investment.
Make no mistake, people will develop different vocabularies for the same activities. Not a problem. Topic maps will be able to help you robustly map between different vocabularies.