Re: Multiple itemtypes in microdata

Hixie- Allow me to try and describe a real, existing use case.

There are a number of ongoing efforts to support the annotation of a
scientific article together with the ability to specify the rhetorical
structure of  a given article. The purpose is to support the
evaluation of a given scientific work to determine whether or not it
is supported by the evidence, and is consistent with related work in
the field.

To quote http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-hcls-swan-20091020/:
"Developing cures for highly complex diseases, such as
neurodegenerative disorders, requires extensive interdisciplinary
collaboration and exchange of biomedical information in context. Our
ability to exchange such information across sub-specialties today is
limited by the current scientific knowledge ecosystem’s inability to
properly contextualize and integrate data and discourse in
machine-interpretable form. This inherently limits the productivity of
research and the progress toward cures for devastating diseases such
as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s."

Vocabularies have been defined to this purpose, and they are gaining
acceptance within the community of workers in the bioinformatics
domain as a legitimate standard for expressing sharable metadata about
scientific publications and statements made within them. Two such
vocabularies are:

SWAN:
AO:

swan:Hypothesis
ao:Annotation

SWAN provides a vocabulary for describing scientific hypotheses; AO
provides a vocabulary for annotation of scholarly documents. They are
distinct vocabularies. Due to their highly technical nature, they are
unlikely to be specializations of any meaningful class within
schema.org. Furthermore, tools and workflows have been created to
produce and consume content marked up with these vocabularies, to
provide support for peer review and collaborative research, for
example in the context of communities like alzforum.org.

As a publisher of scientific content, HTML5 with microdata would be a
valuable delivery format for scholarly content marked up with such
structured data. What I would like to do, in that case is be able to
express the following:

  <p itemscope itemtype="http://example.org/feline">

  </p>

One could, I suppose, simply extend Thing, as in:

http://schema.org/Thing/Annotation
http://schema.org/Thing/Hypothesis

Bradley P. Allen
http://bradleypallen.org



On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2011, Stéphane Corlosquet wrote:
>>
>> I'm not targetting any particular software, I just want to make my data
>> available for whoever wants to use it.
>
> HTML (and the microdata parts of HTML) is definitely not designed for
> non-existent hypothetical use cases. There's no way to design good
> solutions for use cases until we know what the real problems are.
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 13 October 2011 23:46:48 UTC