2 posts tagged with "RDF"

Today NDE releases SCHEMA-AP-NDE 1.0: the first stable version of the Schema.org Application Profile every dataset in the Dutch cultural heritage network is expected to publish. It comes with a backward compatibility promise: as long as we stay on 1.x, data that conforms keeps conforming, and software built against it keeps working.

That is what a 1.0 really is: not just a number, but a signal of stability. It is worth asking what that promise means for a specification, and why a shared profile needs a version number at all.

Schema.org is the web’s most widely adopted vocabulary for structured data, supported by Google, Bing, and countless data platforms. It defines types like CreativeWork, Person, and Organization, giving machines a common language to understand content. This is exactly why the NDE application profile is built on Schema.org. Getting it right is what makes cultural heritage data findable and reusable across institutions.

But if you’ve worked with Schema.org in RDF, you’ve run into this: there’s http://schema.org and then there’s https://schema.org. That one-letter difference can cause real problems: SPARQL queries that silently return nothing, SHACL validation that rejects good data or ignores bad data, or datasets that should link up but don’t – especially when combining data from multiple sources, as in NDE.