IoT in Schema.org through derivation and mappings

[Thad Guidry]

Dan, Richard, et al.

A major portion of IoT vocabulary work is already done out in the wild.  We know that, we acknowledge that.  The problem is therefore how to pull in that effort into Schema.org to benefit publishers (and consumers).

As I mentioned on our Google hangout, a lot of devs, vendors, platform providers, are looking to Schema.org to build out the common vocabulary as we have already done for other domains.  They want to say, for instance, https://schema.org/targetPlatform and have mappings for free that it is equivalent to https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/ssnx/ssn#onPlatform

1. For IoT, it was asked at Mobile World Congress by several devs, vendors, providers, if Schema.org could itself begin to hold those mappings so that they only had to deal with a single Schema.org namespace, i.e., a common vocabulary ( perhaps in our https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/blob/sdo-callisto/data/mappings.rdfa or somesuch ) ?

2. It was also discussed that perhaps to speed things along, if the vocabulary could be derived more instead.  Such as schema.org/Sensor is https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/ssnx/ssn#Sensor  (where perhaps Schema.org may not even hold the full picture of it, but would still acknowledge that it has an https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/ssnx/ssn#term-implements property) to something like https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/ssnx/ssn#Sensor   The general feeling / hope was if Schema.org could become a smarter consensus based collector, rather its current static nature.

The hope above was that it would ease the burden of publishers (and then directly benefit consumers).

The fear is that standards come and go (even something like QUDT or SSN) and that the mappings would become stale if not reviewed by the standards groups themselves periodically in concert with Schema.org community.

Furthermore, having some kind of an overlay view on Schema.org site of the mappings.rdfa or derived views would also be advantageous.  For instance, on https://schema.org/targetPlatform extending [more...] to show the mappings or provide a link that surfaces the mappings.  When standards bodies cannot help fill in a mapped entity because Schema.org doesn't have something that fits wellyet, then discussion could surface on our iot Schema.org mailing list and an issue opened with label "iot" to begin discussion of how to address it or not (new Type, Property, etc)

Thoughts ?