Re: Holdings-as-Offer: wrap-up

Sorry, my previous response was too brief and top-posted to boot. Bad!
I'll try again, more thoroughly and inline...

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
> Dan, the example I had in mind was a little different. Let's say that the
> catalog is for TinyTown Public Library. The display of the holdings is:
>
> Reference    876.54   Library use only
>
> Nothing in that indicates the actual library.

For a hidden value like that, I think one could/should use a META tag
for the "seller" property in the Offer to point at Tiny Town Library.

To modify the existing example accordingly:

 <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
    <meta itemprop="businessFunction"
content="http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#LeaseOut">
    <meta itemprop="seller" content="Example Branch 1</meta>
    <div>Call number: <span itemprop="inventoryIdentifier">876.54</span></div>
    <div>Location: <span itemprop="availableAtOrFrom">Reference</span></div>
    <div>Item status: <span>
        <link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStoreOnly">
        Library use only
    </span></div>
 </div>

I can include an example to cover this use case.

> Another case is for electronic
> materials. Library systems handle this differently, but there isn't a
> location in many cases:
>
> Online    Click here

Good question! What we do in Evergreen currently is essentially:

<li property="offers" vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Offer">
  <a href="URL_FOR_ELECTRONIC_MATERIAL">Available online</a>
  <link property="availability" href="http://schema.org/OnlineOnly" />
  ...
</li>

Glancing at this, I think I need to add in a property="url" to the <a>
link there. And it certainly can have a <meta> tag for the "seller"
property as well. I can include some documentation and an example for
this use case, too.

> I'm thinking that there are cases in which the library itself is not
> included in the holdings statement (or anywhere else on the page) because it
> is inherent in the context of the system being searched. So my question is
> whether there is value in including information about the library itself as
> a super-location to the holdings location, or is the assumption that this
> connection will be made through, e.g., the URL of the web page that has the
> markup?

I think there is significant value to creating 1) a page per library
for a given system that contains the physical addresses / hours / etc,
even for single-library systems and 2) linking to that page
(explicitly, or implicitly via <meta>) from each of the associated
offers. It will enable the search engines to follow their nose based
on our assertions, rather than having to make assumptions about how
many libraries may inherently be represented by library.example.com.

> I think my question leads to a broader one about the use case for library
> data in schema.org. When I look at product examples it is clear to me that
> the target is the URL of the product page. Is this also the assumption for
> library data in schema.org -- that we are expecting a search engine
> retrieval of a page for a library resource, and that page is the target of
> the search? If so, then that URL is all that is needed to link to the
> library and its resource. If, however, we anticipate other uses to be made
> of the schema mark-up, such as organizing retrieved items by geographical
> location, then we need to get that information into each web page. This may
> be unrelated to the markup of holdings, but it was this proposal that
> brought it to mind.

Good question again. I see the primary use case being the search
engines ingesting a sitemap, crawling all of the listed pages, and
sorting out the items and linked offers accordingly.

In the case of our library catalogue, I created a sitemap that lists
each of the record detail pages, which expose metadata & holdings.
Unfortunately, when I generated the sitemap last year, it was before I
had implemented holdings-as-offers; now that all of the attached
offers will be part of each record details page, I think a new crawl
of those pages could provoke much more interesting results.

Received on Saturday, 19 October 2013 02:22:36 UTC