Modelling Course and CourseOffering

Hello all,
I asked for comments on the use cases, scope description and definition 
of an educational course [1]. There have been some suggested new use 
cases and clarification of the scope with respect to aggregations of 
courses. I have updated the pages on the wiki accordingly. Nudge me if I 
have forgotten anything or not captured your meaning. If you have any 
other comment please add them to that thread, but the general shape 
seems uncontroversial so I would like to start a couple of new 
discussion threads for how to meet requirements arising from the use cases.

The first of these is around the modelling of courses and course 
offerings. This is tricky. There have been discussions in a couple of 
places at least: on Vicki's Google doc proposal [2] and Wes's pull 
request [3].

Consensus seems limited at the moment to
- we need a schema.org type: Course
- there are abstract and concrete aspects of courses, i.e. the (abstract 
) thing that is offered year after year and instantiations of it that 
run between set dates and at set locations (on- or offline)

Open for discussion:
- should Course be a subtype of Intangible or CreativeWork
- is there a need for a separate type for the instantiation?
   --if there is need, can we agree to call it a CourseOffering?


I propose that we continue the discussion here, but in order to make 
progress pending an outcome to that discussion (and in the hope of 
informing the discussion with real world examples) we try the following:
- work with a model that has two new types Course and CourseOffering
- we do not assume any parent for these types yet, but we do try to meet 
requirements by drawing in properties from other types already in 
schema.org rather than create new ones. For example, if we want to know 
what a course is about we use the existing 'about' property form 
CreativeWork, if we want to know when a CourseOffering runs we use might 
find something in Event.

At the end of the process we will know what schema type a Course and 
CourseOffering most looks like, which would be one factor in deciding 
what it should be a subtype of. We will also know whether they look 
substantially different.


Do you think that will work?

Phil

1. 
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-schema-course-extend/2016Feb/att-0001/00-part
2. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit
3. 
https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/pull/972#issuecomment-173560886 & 
following comments

-- 
Phil Barker           @philbarker
LRMI, Cetis, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil
Heriot-Watt University

Workflow: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/workflow/



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Received on Tuesday, 9 February 2016 13:02:58 UTC