Schema.org vs. W3C?
Hello,
I’m following in recent months the Schema.org (http://schema.org/) developed by Bing, Google and Yahoo! Schema.org is a metadata vocabulary to mark up content web pages.
In my opinion, the project has many possibilities to success because has the support of the three most important web engines. But it also has some controversial aspects I would like to share with you.
On is Schema.org is developed outside the framework of W3C, when W3C is leading the Semantic Web from many years, and also Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are members of the consortium. This apparently contradiction is reflected in the choice of Microdata (http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/) as mark-up syntax instead of RDFa (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-primer/), the syntax promoted by W3C.
Maybe the reason is that Schema.org and Linked Data (W3C) have different goals to mark-up web content, but on the other hand Schema.org is collaborating with W3C and RDFa Lite as we can see in http://blog.schema.org/2011/11/using-rdfa-11-lite-with-schemaorg.html. Then, maybe their goals aren’t so different?
What are your thoughts?
Andreu Sulé
University of Barcelona
Spain
Hi Andreu,
Actually schema.org is entirely W3C friendly. Some of the examples on their pages are Microdata based, yes, but this doesn’t make them incompatible with RDF.
Check out their Data Model page: http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html
They have an OWL version of all the terms: http://schema.org/docs/schemaorg.owl
And they recently launched lots of support around JSON-LD: http://blog.schema.org/2013/06/schemaorg-and-json-ld.html
So I would say to the contrary, that schema.org is entirely compliant with W3C standards.