Re: new itemscope or not?

Ed, thanks for this. It all comes down to testing effectiveness, I guess - I am not wedded to any one approach. I like what Schema has done with ISBN.

On Sep 7, 2012, at 2:10 PM, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com<mailto:ehs@pobox.com>> wrote:

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Dawson, Laura <Laura.Dawson@bowker.com<mailto:Laura.Dawson@bowker.com>> wrote:
This is music to my ears. It seems inevitable that more identifiers are going to prove to be critical components of Schema. There is a public entity name ID (ISNI) that would be helpful to differentiate & collocate names; there is a similar identifier in the STM world called the ORCID (which is interoperable with ISNI and in fact may actually really BE an ISNI, as they've been allocated for ORCID); there is a text ID (ISTC) that identifies text independent of format; there is of course the ISBN; there is the ISRC, which identifies recordings; there is the ISAN, which identifies addresses. And there is the DOI, which identifies links themselves.

I've been talking a little with Richard Wallis about the inclusion of identifiers in Schema - there are a couple of models. One of these is to have a separate class of objects called "identifiers"; the other is to have the identifiers as attributes in the schemas themselves. I'm leaning towards the former simply because a thing can have more than one identifier (a book, for example, can have an ISBN and an ISTC; an author can have an ISNI and an ORCID), and a relational model may be more flexible.

One thing that Cord pointed out is that HTML Microdata already has a
mechanism for saying when a given entity (author, etc) has an
identifier: the itemid attribute.

So for example:

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Book">
 <span itemid="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare">itemprop="author"
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
   <span itemprop="name">Shakespeare, William</span>
 </span>
</div>

I'd encourage you to try using it before defining an Identifier class,
or including them in all the schemas that could potentially have an
identification mechanism (probably most of them).

//Ed

Laura Dawson
Product Manager, Identifiers
Bowker
908-219-0082
917-770-6641
laura.dawson@bowker.com<mailto:laura.dawson@bowker.com>