WebSchemas/WebObsSchema

This is an archived WebSchemas proposal Web Observatory for schema.org. See Proposals listing for more. Note: active schema.org development is now based at github

Overview

This page provides an overview of proposed schema extensions for describing collaboration portals known as web observatories, as proposed by the Web Science community. The W3C Web Observatory Community Group makes the case for web observatories as follows:

The sister organisation of W3C, the Web Science Trust proposes to create a global "Web Observatory". The Open Data movement and the Transparency Agenda are successfully advocating the release of very large institutional and commercial data sets describing social phenomena, economic indicators and geographic trends. This proliferation of data represents great opportunity for researchers and industry but this data abundance also threatens to make it ever more difficult to locate, analyse, compare and interpret useful information in a consistent and reliable way; a situation which can only get worse unless we can help stakeholders perform useful analysis rather than drowning in a sea of data. The Web Observatory will offer an institutional framework to promote the use of W3C and other standards in the development of; Semantic Catalogues to globally locate existing data sets, Collection Systems to gather new global data sets, and Analytics Tools and methodologies to analyse these data sets. This community group seeks to articulate the business and technical requirements for the Web Observatory.

Vocabularies

The following proposed vocabularies are described in detail at the LOGD Portal at TWC RPI. W3C hosting of this content to follow

• Thing > CreativeWork > Web Observatory : A portal for projects, datasets and tools used to study the Web
• Thing > CreativeWork > Web Observatory: Project : A project found in a Web Observatory
• Thing > CreativeWork > Web Observatory: Dataset : A dataset belonging to a Web Observatory Project
• Thing > CreativeWork > Web Observatory: Tool : Tools associated with a Web Observatory Project.

Reference Implementations

The following are reference implementations demonstrating markup using the Web Observatory vocabularies

• TWC RPI Web Observatory Portal: Demonstrates the use of all four vocabularies; demonstrates using the vocabularies to describe four separate web observatories on a single page.

Tools

The following are tools used for testing and evaluation of the Web Observatory vocabularies

• TWC Web Observatory Crawler: (link TBA) Crawls known web observatories and aggregates metadata in RDF.