[Bibjson-dev] Schema.org

Tue Jun 7 19:11:27 UTC 2011

This http://schema.org/ looks like an important development for both SchHTML and BibJSON.
Peter, please can you forward to the SchHTML community?

>This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.
>Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.
>A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use. 

The search engines should strongly motivate data providers to make their data available according to these schemas.

I think we should respond to this initiative by

1) quickly identifying how objects of interest to us can be generically embedded in crude forms of BibJSON. These objects include especially

http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle

Note the schema is crude, and does not even have a placeholders for usual "journal", "pages" or "howpublished" or identifier attributes like "doi", "issn", ....

http://schema.org/Person

Note that there appear to be no attributes like "homepage" or "profilepage" so it is not easy to indicate the person by a URI.

2) develop and support tools for harvesting data from a page compliant with schema.org and mapping it to BibJSON for further processing

3) provide sample mappings back from BibJSON to html compliant with schema.org , and to richer forms regarded as acceptable SchHTML.

There will be finer things we want to indicate in BibJSON and ScHTML data, but this should be possible by extensions of schema.org.
We can always fall back on BIBO, FOAF etc, but it could easily be that schema.org largely replaces all of these.

I think some hand-in-hand development of BibJSON and ScHTML consistent with the broad modelling of object-types laid out by schema.org
could be very rewarding.

--Jim
----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman