Re: Question on proposed sports vocab extensions for schema.org

Hi Thad
I dont think I agree with that.
A Person (or an Agent to be more correct) becomes a competitor through
a relationship with a sporting event (eg sport:Competition in the
sport ontology, or schema:SportsEvent in schema.org) - being a
competitor is temporal for the duration of the event (and of course
future and historical sporting events).

Some more examples why vocations should not be subclasses of a Person:
If we had Actor subClassOf Person, this implies we also need Actor
subClassOf Horse and Dog  (Black Beauty and Lassie) - which would mean
that John Wayne (as an instance of Actor) would also thus be a Dog and
a Horse which is clearly incorrect. The concept of an Athlete is
exactly the same.

When we create closed domain models that only work within our domain,
then you are correct, you can effectively do what you want as you only
have to make the model work for your own closed domain use-cases.
However when specifying an open-world model (ontology, schema or
otherwise) that you expect the world to use, then your model has to
model the world accurately and work for all use cases and edge cases
- not just your own.

In this case, the Athlete subClassOf Person model does not work for
all use-cases.
If Athlete was a vocation then this vocation would not be restricted
just to People so would work for ESPN's use-case.

kind regards
Paul



On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:
> My opinion is that Athletes are indeed a sub-type of a Person.
>
> You could look at the problem from a different angle as well.  Your examples
> of a horse, robot, etc... would be a different type, such as "Competitors".
>
> ESPN simply decided to create their own rule of "ALL COMPETITORS ARE
> ATHLETES".  Nothing wrong with making their own rules within their own
> namespace, "their website, or TV channel".  My rules would say that "ALL
> ATHLETES ARE PERSONS" and "ALL COMPETITORS COMPETE IN AN SPORTING EVENT"
>
> --
> -Thad
> http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry

Received on Tuesday, 6 March 2012 09:52:11 UTC