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Great question, because it is basically the most ignored problem in the Semantic Web community and thus the one that we are spending quite a lot of time on. So, basically, there is one data model, RDF, but RDF does not require the same set of fields, to the contrary you are free to write your own. Obviously, you wouldn't get good interoperability if you do. So, there are several things you can do: 1) Adopt what others are using
2) Map your "fields" (we're more for calling it vocabularies), to the stuff others are doing, and rely on apps to figure out interop using reasoners.
3) Don't care, your app will work fine for you. I mean, 3) is fine, it is just that you'd be missing out. 2) also works, kinda, but reasoners aren't all that easy to use, so I'd mostly like to see people go for 1). So, we need to make it really easy to find existing stuff. You could go for the big one, i.e. https://schema.org/ or you could go more in detail and look at https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/ . The former has a lot of traction, the latter is real decentralized, so I kinda prefer that. Then, we have to make it real easy to author new stuff when you can't find existing stuff, because that will happen. Then, we need to make it easy for others to find yours, so that they can start using it too for similar applications. And, I'm thinking that it will be kind of a graduation process, where you first look for existing stuff, and when failing to find anything, you just mint your own without thinking about others, just to get something that works up and running. Once your app starts gaining traction, you tighten it up, and if then something other gets popular, you can migrate to that with little disruption. So, we're not there yet, but we're thinking and working on it a lot. |