[DDI-users] Schema.org, DSPL, DDI, etc. [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Samuel Spencer]

Stefan,

Schema.org is an interesting take on microformats, and they were quick to
allow conformance to RDFa and the like.
The interesting omission is the lack of statistical or data tags. Unlike
Dublin Core or it's implementations (such as AGLS), schema.org has much
more of a consumer focus, and you'll notice the vast majority of
information is around consumer information (eg. movies, music, products,
prices, events, brands, etc...) with a few additional social networking
aspects thrown in (eg. blogs, personal info)
At its heart Schema.org is a tool seems to serve eCommerce roles above
others, which is fine, but realising this focus is important.
While it allows for extension, it again means inventing ones own standard
for data which may not be picked up or understood by the major
implementers.

DSPL is another kettle of fish, and I am an enthusiastic fan. When it first
came out I wrote up an article comparing it to SDMX
[http://bit.ly/dspl-sdmx] and few more on its potential uses
[http://bit.ly/dspl-uses] .
I see DSPL as more of a specialised data format for visualisation in
contrast to the discovery and governance focused SDMX.
Given that metadata heavy formats, such as SDMX, can grow quite large, they
would be use for data sharing and discovery, which could then be
destructively transformed into the much lighter-weight DSPL for
visualisation and analysis.

My two cents.

Samuel Spencer
Australian Bureau of Statistics
Technical Architect - Data Management
Asia/Pacific Regional Representative - International Association of Social
Science Information Services and Technology

--- Specificity is the soul of all good communication ---
--- When the game is over, the king and the pawn go in the same box ---


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  |Stefan Kramer <stefan.kramer at cornell.edu>                                                                                                         |
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  |"DDI-users at icpsr.umich.edu" <DDI-users at icpsr.umich.edu>, "members at opendatafoundation.org" <members at opendatafoundation.org>                        |
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  |06/07/2011 03:57 AM                                                                                                                               |
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  |[DDI-users] Schema.org, DSPL, DDI, etc.                                                                                                           |
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  |ddi-users-bounces at icpsr.umich.edu                                                                                                                 |
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Of potential interest to anyone concerned with the development of
overlapping/complementing/etc. metadata standards, how that plays into the
discoverability of statistical/numeric (research) data on the web, etc. -
this apparently being developed by three major search engine providers:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html

http://schema.org/docs/full.html
http://schema.org/docs/faq.html

while Google is *also* advocating DSPL: Dataset Publishing Language (
http://code.google.com/apis/publicdata/).   "The nice thing about standards
is that there are so many of them to choose from" (Andrew Tanenbaum) might
come to mind if this was a claim to a standardization, but at least it's
not that (http://schema.org/docs/faq.html#3).

There's a feedback form: http://schema.org/docs/feedback.html
And a discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/schemaorg-discussion

Stefan Kramer
Research Data Management Librarian
stefan.kramer at cornell.edu
Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER)
391 Pine Tree Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA



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