Re: ComicSeries publisher/imprint

Hey all:

A quick first note to respond to something Henry said in his original email:

> Imprint appears to be the only publisher data being stored, although I see
> publisher fields in the examples at the PeriodicalVolume/ComicSeries level.
> If there isn't a publisher field, is the imprint intended to link to some
> sort of publisher object that contains various imprints? (which can be a
> complex many-to-many relationship, or involve otherwise identical imprints
> in multiple places.

Happily, there actually is a publisher field available to Periodical
types and Comic types. The Periodical and Comic types are all
subclasses of CreativeWork, so they inherit the
http://schema.org/publisher property. So you can use both publisher
and imprint on Comic types (although imprint is currently restricted
to being used on ComicSeries, the thought having been that there would
always be at least one described ComicSeries for any given story or
comic, even for a one-shot).

I can't take credit for that; I have to imagine that this was also the
thinking behind the original Comics proposal for "imprint" (to be used
in conjunction with "publisher" where necessary).

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 4:09 AM, Owen Stephens <owen@ostephens.com> wrote:
> I've not got a huge amount to add to this, but from the academic journal
> publishing side I think the picture is pretty similar. Imprint is definitely
> separate from 'publisher' in this case. I'd probably broadly boil your four
> definitions of Imprint down to two in this case:
>
> * Brand (encompasses your 1 and 4)
> * Subsidiaries (your 2 and 3)

<snip>

> potentially there can be more information available behind it (and I can
> imagine this is an area where schema.org isn't going to be what is needed to
> describe the underlying complexity).

Actually... the Organization type has a "brand" property, the
pertinent definition of which is "the brand(s) maintained by an
organization". And it also has a "subOrganization" property, which
points at an organization and has the relevant description "A
relationship between two organizations where the first includes the
second, e.g., as a subsidiary".

So while I don't claim it can cover every byzantine publisher case, it
is possible to model some very complex publisher / brand / imprint
relationships in schema.org today; that's what the proposal is trying
to tap into through the "publisher" and "imprint" properties. There's
a bit of a challenge in the lack of an upwards-pointing equivalent for
the subOrganization property if you want to point at a subsidiary and
have the search engine know that it is a subsidiary, but it's workable
through meta elements I suppose.

I suppose one could even consider ditching the "imprint" property and
just repeating "publisher", or exposing the publisher / subsidiary
relationship in the markup. Something like the following, perhaps:

<div property="publisher" typeof="Organization">Publisher: <span
property="name">Elsevier</span>
  <div property="subOrganization" typeof="Organization">Imprint: <span
property="name">Mosby</span></div>
</div>

But there may be an advantage to maintaining "imprint" as a distinct
property that defines a stronger relationship to the work being
described, rather than just adding one of a list of possible imprints
to the overall understanding of the publisher.

Thanks,
Dan

Received on Monday, 9 December 2013 13:56:48 UTC