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I'm working on forum software, and looking to use HTML5 and Microdata(new to microdata). I was considering adding vocabulary to the software itself, instead of linking to schema or data-vocabulary, or whatever.

Then again, I wondered about the impact this may have server performance, being hit by all those spiders crawling the vocabulary.

What are your thoughts on this?

Xarcell
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  • *Why* would you want to create a new vocabulary at all? The whole point about the Semantic Web is using *shared* vocabularies. Only if the existing vocabularies don't match your content, you'd want to create new ones. Also, I bet you wouldn't notice any performance impact, because almost noone would crawl those URIs. – unor Jan 03 '13 at 12:26
  • That's exactly why, because it isn't defined. Why wouldn't they crawl the vocabulary? – Xarcell Jan 03 '13 at 15:15
  • What would crawlers find there? I'm not savvy with microdata, but at least with RDFa you wouldn't have to provide any content at all at those URIs. They are identifiers. If a bot parses RDFa/microdata and finds a known URI (like schema.org), there is no need to follow it. If it finds an unknown URI, there is no use to follow it, because it probably would find documentation for humans only. If you provide machine-readable metadata *about* the vocabulary at those URIs (which would be good, I guess), it might be useful for bots. But I'd bet that there are almost no bots that look for it. – unor Jan 03 '13 at 15:50
  • FWIW, did you have a look at [SIOC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantically-Interlinked_Online_Communities)? – unor Jan 03 '13 at 15:52
  • SIOC certainly looks interesting, but I am not a programmer, just a designer. I don't know how to implement it. – Xarcell Jan 04 '13 at 02:39
  • It's a vocabulary (like those at schema.org), so in the end it's only URIs ;) SIOC is designed for RDF, but if you can use microdata, you are also able to use RDFa (Lite). Same thing, slightly different syntax. Also it's only markup, no programming needed. – unor Jan 04 '13 at 03:46
  • Yes, but from the examples it is in XML, which throws me off a bit. So I am unsure how to markup my HTML tags with it, since all examples seem to be the same and in XML. – Xarcell Jan 04 '13 at 23:02
  • The RDF/XML is only one (of many) ways to mark it up. You'd want to use RDFa (Lite), which looks similar to microdata. – unor Jan 05 '13 at 01:08

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You should only create a new vocabulary if there is no (popular) existing one that could be used.

Dublin Core, FOAF and SIOC are popular ones that almost every forum could use. However, I'm not sure if these can be used with microdata (I guess it should be possible, but I don't know microdata very well). But they work with RDFa, which is very similar to microdata and a W3C recommendation (like HTML). RDFa can be used in HTML5, too. If new to RDF, you'd probably want to use RDFa Lite first (it has prefixes for DC, FOAF and schema.org vocabularies pre-defined).

I wondered about the impact this may have server performance, being hit by all those spiders crawling the vocabulary.

I don't think there are many (if any at all) microdata crawlers that would try to visit the vocabulary URIs. In most cases they wouldn't find any content there they could make use of, because the vocabulary URIs work as identifier only most of the time. Even if such crawlers arise, you'd hardly notice any performance impact because they'd probably cache it anyway.

unor
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