Re: FictionalThing proposal added to Web Schemas wiki

> On 19/02/2013 15:54, "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I would agree if fictional was only a state - I flirted with the idea of
> proposing a Boolean 'fictional' property on Thing.  But that denies the
> possibility of identifying the context in which a fictional thing exists
> (even fictionally ;).
> 
> Searching for fictional things in Wikipedia soon identifies a pattern of
> needing to describe them in the context of creative work(s) in which they
> appear:
> 
> * Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the
> first part of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels
> * Mount Doom is a fictional volcano in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth
> legendarium
> * Kryptonite is a fictional material from the Superman mythos
> * The Nautilus is the fictional submarine captained by Nemo featured in
> Jules Verne's novels
> 
> Hence my proposal for a Type with properties to satisfy that need, as I
> believe that overloading Thing with properties that are only relevant if the
> thing is fiction would be possibly confusing.  Happy to be convinced
> otherwise but.....

I think top-level FictionalThing type seems like it is more generally useful in order to be able to define properties on things which are fictional.

The Wikia use case is certainly about being able to identify things as being fictional, and having alternative properties based upon that fictionality. For example, a (Place, FictionalThing) might have alternative location properties which are appropriate for things which are the union of Place and FictionalThing, but not Place or FictionalThing on their own.

More important for us is to be able to have a "character" property on things such as TVEpisode and Movie (and a VideoGame, which isn't in the vocabulary at all). I would think that the range of that property would be Character (also not currently existing), not Person.

Gregg

> ~Richard.
> 
> 
> 

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 14:01:58 UTC