Re: Historical events

Allison,

I am not part of Schema.org directly but volunteer my time as a reviewer.
I also volunteer my time aligning and mapping Schema.org to many other
ontologies, to help many systems be more interoperable.

The tasks to give you was just a bit of ribbing and joking, but there is
legitimate work to do around mapping Schema.org to other ontologies.
https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/280 And that always greatly
expands when any new Type lands in Schema.org...but not as much work when a
new property arrives.

I still think the level of effort you put in to have concatenated Things or
Concepts (Food + Event) into Schema.org Types and then trying to have them
accepted is not worth that effort if you are wanting to create buckets or
high-level categories in the hopes that Google, Bing, Yahoo and others will
have a richer understanding of differences between the strings "coronation
of a monarch" and "volcanic eruption".  It is because they already know
those differences, so those suggested types don't help much. However !!,
what they don't know about very much are the details and properties of each
and if/how they relate or not, if/how they relate to other types, etc. -
i.e. the magic of mapping, connecting the dots, subclassifying, adding and
correcting data on various public datasets like Wikidata, Wikipedia,
DBpedia, and lending a hand to notify other ontologies where they might
improve.

What does help more around here, within Schema.org itself ?
If instead we are talking about VALUABLE PROPERTIES and the data that each
one holds, then that is a different story.
What are some common properties that a HistoricalEvent, FoodEvent,
DanceEvent, MusicEvent can share ?  (The microdata your interested in
providing) What is missing from our current Event type that those types
would benefit from ?  Where are the gaps in properties.  That is what helps
more. And of course Richard's suggestion of fixing the description on Event
itself, which hopefully he does SOON :-)

But as Phil said, it is much better to organize a bit and form a wider
community to collaborate somewhere (He and Richard can help you form a W3C
volunteer community space online) and then get consensus on what are some
good extra types and their properties, where are the gaps...and then
propose those in a document somewhere where others can review.  Once
consensus arrives, then typically Schema.org stakeholders, myself, other
volunteers will review and provide feedback.

Helpful ?  Fire away, more than happy to answer questions and provide the
realities of what works or doesn't around here :-)
-Thad