What is a 'vocabulary'

[chaals]

The specification mentions vocabularies, and vocabulary specifications, dozens of times. It makes assertion about vocabulary design, and about constraints that are imposed by vocabularies. But it never actually says what a vocabulary is.

I think that a lot of the fixing needed is editorial, but given that there is no formal way of processing a vocabulary, we might end up making some substantive changes like removing constraints, or insteadof saying "only if it is allowed by a vocabulary" provide the more actionable "unless invalid according to a machine-readable specification of the item type: or some such.

[gkellogg]

In Microdata to RDF a vocabular is established via @itemtype. There is a mechanism to make document-relative URIs if there is no established type. The first version had some arcane URI-building logic to support hcard (IIRC), but that was trimmed in the second version. Most of the logic for building URIs is in Generate Predicate URI.

[chaals]

This should be more or less resolved by #49 - effectively, we don't really say how to define a vocabulary, you can do it how you want. We do note that you can use e.g. prose or something like RDF.

[chaals]

I think the outstanding bit of the question is covered by #50

If so, we could close this... @danbri, @iherman

[chaals]

fixed by #49 and #51