Re: FictionalThing proposal added to Web Schemas wiki

On 19 February 2013 15:07, Mo McRoberts <Mo.McRoberts@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> As I understand it, the BBC's internal archive classification scheme wrestled with precisely this issue — in the end it settled on 'people', 'fictional people' and 'religious entities', with some fairly clear guidelines about what to do if there was doubt about which of latter two somewhere should sit (and all three were considered mutually exclusive). At least then the consumer of the data can deal with the information as it sees fit.
>
> I'll readily admit it's by no means an easy thing to settle, however: what about real people appearing 'as themselves' in a fictional work? The person themselves is as real as you or I, but the events in which they participate are fictional. I don't think we ever quite solved that one in the archive classifications.

Yes, let's not get into the business of deciding which Gods exist. Or
people, for that matter?

http://schema.org/Person 'A person (alive, dead, undead, or
fictional).' ...tries to avoid the issue.

I'm glad either way that there is a target proposal now to debate.

I had a quick chat with Guha recently re FictionalX. His suggestion
was that fictitiousness was not best expressed with special types, but
with special properties.

Another route is to just accept that some documents in the Web contain
microdata/rdfa that is not strictly true of our current world. We know
the Web is full of lies, half-truths and mischief, so this should not
take a huge leap of the imagination. Perhaps some documents can be
written according to life in fictional universes. So rather than
describing a soap opera where some person 1 has a fictionalBrother,
person 2 ... we write simple schema.org markup 'as if it were true',
and then have document-level annotations about the pages that contain
those claims.

I'm not sure of the best approach yet, but I'm worried about the
complexity introduced by shadowing vocabulary (whether types or
properties) into a parallel hierarchy...

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 19 February 2013 15:55:06 UTC