<story><title>Tech giants let the Web&apos;s metadata schemas and infrastructure languish</title><url>https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1291509746000855040.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>the_duke</author><text>Actual title: Google and other tech giants are happy to have control over the Web&amp;#x27;s metadata schemas, but they let its infrastructure languish&lt;p&gt;I know that hating on Google is fashionable, but that&amp;#x27;s a bit too much editorializing. Especially considering the content of the post, and Google just being a small side note.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;On-topic: I recently looked into using schema.org types as the basis for a information capturing system, but many of the types are somewhat outdated, of questionable quality or just missing.  Development indeed seems slow, while changes that are needed by one of the larger involved companies get pushed through quickly.&lt;p&gt;I think a big part of that stagnation is a lack of interest though. The whole semantic web domain has been pretty much inactive.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a real shame: having canonical types for most things in existence, and have those actually be supported as import&amp;#x2F;export formats or for cross-app integrations, would be immensely valuable! But there is absolutely no business incentive there - rather the opposite. Easy portability of data is not something most companies would want.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Vinnl</author><text>&amp;gt; But there is absolutely no business incentive there - rather the opposite. Easy portability of data is not something most companies would want.&lt;p&gt;That depends on what kind of data it is. For example, your home address is not part of your bank&amp;#x27;s primary business model, but keeping it up-to-date is important for it. If data portability in and out of the bank makes it more likely that you&amp;#x27;ll keep it up-to-date, that&amp;#x27;s useful for your bank as well.&lt;p&gt;Legislation and customer demand is also making it more and more palatable. If some data is not critical to your business model, but being the sole guardian of it is a legal&amp;#x2F;reputational liability is, then actually handing control over that data over to someone else and re-using that is very useful.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tech giants let the Web&apos;s metadata schemas and infrastructure languish</title><url>https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1291509746000855040.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>the_duke</author><text>Actual title: Google and other tech giants are happy to have control over the Web&amp;#x27;s metadata schemas, but they let its infrastructure languish&lt;p&gt;I know that hating on Google is fashionable, but that&amp;#x27;s a bit too much editorializing. Especially considering the content of the post, and Google just being a small side note.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;On-topic: I recently looked into using schema.org types as the basis for a information capturing system, but many of the types are somewhat outdated, of questionable quality or just missing.  Development indeed seems slow, while changes that are needed by one of the larger involved companies get pushed through quickly.&lt;p&gt;I think a big part of that stagnation is a lack of interest though. The whole semantic web domain has been pretty much inactive.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a real shame: having canonical types for most things in existence, and have those actually be supported as import&amp;#x2F;export formats or for cross-app integrations, would be immensely valuable! But there is absolutely no business incentive there - rather the opposite. Easy portability of data is not something most companies would want.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacques_chester</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a textbook collective action problem. Everyone would gain from having a high-quality shared ontology, but nobody gains enough individually (it&amp;#x27;s a public good).&lt;p&gt;The typical solutions to collective action problems are (1) benefactors who subsidise production (either privately or through taxation), or (2) direct command and control. Google was apparently filling the role of benefactor.</text></comment>