Schema.org

2 statements.

Author	Tags	Primary Session	Secondary Sessions	Position Statement
Adam Baso	Machine Learning, Mobile, Schema.org, Structured Data, Templates, Wikibase, Wikidata	Knowledge as a Service	Advancing the Contributor Experience, Research, Analytics, and Machine Learning	Structure Most Things with Schema.org The future of digital information will likely be brokered by major platform providers such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and international equivalents and social networks. We're thankful they extend our reach, even as we seek to help consumers on the platforms join our movement. We could help platform providers, their users, and our users solve problems better through adoption of the open standard Schema.org into Wikipedia pages mapped with templates and, ideally, federated and synchronized Wikidata properties. Benefits: Wikipedia will have even better presentation and placement in search engines and other data rich experiences. We provide an opportunity for a more consistent data model for template authors and people/bots filling template values. And the richly defined Schema.org entities provide a good target to reach on all entities represented in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia corpora. Standardization can reduce duplication of effort and inconsistencies. We introduce an easier vector for mobile contribution, which could include simpler and different data entry, mapping, and modeling. We can elevate an open standard and push its adoption forward while increasing the movement's standing in the open standards community. Schema.org compliant data is more easily amenable to machine learning models that cover data structures, the relations between entities, and the dynamics of sociotechnical systems. This could bolster practical applications like vandalism detection, coverage analysis, and much more. This might provide a means for the education sector to educate students about knowledge creation, and data modeling, and more. It might also afford scientists and other practitioners a further standardized way to model the knowledge in their fields. What would it take? And can this be done in harmony with the existing {{Template}} system? This session will discuss the following: Are we aligned on the benefits, and which ones? Implementation options. Can we extend templates so they could be mapped to Schema.org? Would it be okay to derive the mapping by manual and automated analysis at WMF/WMDE and apply it behind the scenes? Would that be sustainable? Could we make it easy for template authors to mark up their templates for Schema.org compatibility and have some level of enforcement? Could Schema.org attributes and entity types be autosuggested for template creators? Is it easy to relate the most existing and proposed Wikidata entity types and properties to existing Schema.org entities and properties? What would it take to streamline MCR Schema.org data structures or MCR Wikibase property clusters mapped to Schema.org on defined entity types? Furthermore, if we can do #1 and #2, what's to prevent us from letting templates as is merely be the interface for Schema.org compliant Wikibase entities and properties (e.g., by duck typing / autosynthesis)? How could we bidirectionally synchronized between Wikipedia and Wikidata with confidence in a way compatible with patroller expectations? And what storage and event processing would be needed? Can the systems be scaled in a way to accommodate arrival of real-time and increasingly fine grained information?
Subramanya Sastry	API, Knowledge as a Service, Schema.org, Structural Semantics, Templates, Wikidata	Advancing the Contributor Experience	Knowledge as a Service	PROBLEM To satisfy the 'Knowledge as a service' theme, in addition to providing access to full page content, Wikimedia APIs should provide access to semantic units at: - an abstract document level (sections, headings, tables, etc.) - a domain specific level (infoboxes, geolocation, taxoboxes, etc.) Wikitext, the core content creation technology on wikis, evolved as a string-processing language where one set of strings is replaced with another set of strings mostly via regular expression matches to yield the output HTML string. There is no notion of document structures here. This lack of structural semantics gets in the way of being able to robustly identify semantic units and developing tools and features that operate on a page structurally at sub-page granularities. SOLUTION: TRANSPARENT TYPING LAYER OVER WIKITEXT Types improve abstraction, reasoning, and tooling abilities in programming languages. A transparent typing layer on top of wikitext can provide similar benefits. A: ENFORCE STRUCTURAL TYPES ON OUTPUT OF WIKITEXT CONSTRUCTS INCLUDING TEMPLATES AND EXTENSIONS - Specify that all wikitext constructs have an output with type: String, DOM, CSS property, HTML-attribute, or a List of one of those - Extensions and templates can specify the expected output type. All other core wikitext constructs have the DOM output type. - Parser enforces the output type of all wikitext constructs. Examples: For DOM types, unclosed tags and misnested tags are fixed up. For String types, HTML tags are escaped, wikitext strings are nowikied. For CSS types, values are sanitized. Among other benefits, this basic typing mechanism enables MediaWiki to provide an API to extract and edit document fragments without introducing adverse side-effects on the rest of the page. B: UNIFIED TYPING MECHANISM TO EXPOSE DOMAIN-SPECIFIC SEMANTIC INFORMATION Editors impose structure in documents through a rich library of templates, policies, and maintainance processes they have developed over the years. If this semantic information (infoboxes, navboxes, sports rankings, railway timetables, etc) is mapped to a centralized ontology system (wikidata, schema.org, something else), the parser can expose this information in HTML and via MediaWiki APIs can expose this information in a wiki-neutral way. There are multiple disparate mechanisms today wherein template authors specify metadata about templates (templatadata, templatestyles, possibly others?) Instead of creating newer mechanisms for specifying structural output types and semantic information types for templates, it is better to provide a consolidated mechanism that unifies all this template metadata into a single user-defined type declaration. This lets newer applications and capabilities to be developed in the future without code changes to the core mechanism. FEASIBILITY This typing layer only affects template authors. Editors that use source editing won't see any impact (besides fewer markup errors). Editors that use visual editing might see improved tooling. Even for template authors, this is meant to be an opt-in mechanism with gradual migration over to the new model. The proposal here is a logical extension of what Parsoid does today. Parsoid provides an illusion of structured wikitext and demonstrates what is possible (VE, CX, Linter, Flow among others) by embracing structured semantics.