Re: Modeling fictional characters in movies and TV

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@greggkellogg.net>wrote:

> TL:DR: propose adding schema:Character, schema:Location, and
> schema:FictionalLocation classes, along with a schema:character property.
>
> In the work I'm doing with Wikia, we're using extensions to schema.org to
> add structure to Wiki content. Wikia hosts hundreds of thousands of wiki's,
> mostly related to special-interest subjects. Important classes of these
> include sites about Movies, TV Shows/Series and Video Games.
>

Cool!!


>
> The schema.org vocabulary is pretty useful in doing this but lacks some
> important properties and types:
>
> Character class: a Character is a subclass of Person, which is intended to
> represent some fictional character. This could include fictional human
> characters, such as Sam Spade, as well as non-human characters, such as
> "The Cat in the Hat". As such, it could also be considered to be a union of
> schema:CreativeWork and schema:Person. Alternatively, it may simply be a
> sub-class of Creative Work which simply has some properties in common with
> Person (birthDate, colleague, gender, ...). Note that books can also have
> characters.
>
> Character property: An important characteristic of things such as movies,
> and TV shows is the characters that are in them. For instance, TVEpisode
> has actor, director, producer and so forth, but no way to indicate the
> characters that are in the show. Here is where having Character class comes
> in handy, so that you might have the following:
>
> <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Where_No_Man_Has_Gone_Before_(episode)>
>   a schema:TVEpisode;
>   schema:name "Where No Man Has Gone Before"@en;
>   schema:partOfTVSeries <
> http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series>;
>   schema:character <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_T._Kirk>;
>   schema:actor <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/William_Shatner> .
>

One downside of this is that when you have multiple characters you lose the
ability to correlate the actor to the character.

An alternative, that Freebase uses, is to create a class for Performance,
that has the properties of character (expects Character has you defined)
and actor (which works the same as actor on today).

Connecting that to TVEpisode could be done with either a new "performance"
property or by making actor accept Person or Performance.


>
> <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_T._Kirk> a schema:Character
>   schema:name "James T. Kirk";
>   schema:birthDate "2233-03-22"^^xsd:date;
>   schema:deathDate "2371"^^xsd:gYear;
>   schema:actor <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/William_Shatner> .
>
> Another class of properties generally useful for works of media classes is
> Location. A schema:Location class could be a sub-class of schema:Place,
> intended to describe locations that might not be real, or not at least not
> having geographic coordinates you can get to using Goole Maps. A location
> could also be a Fictional Location, such as Middle Earth.
>
> Lastly, many wiki's concern themselves with Video Games, which have quite
> deep structure. Logically, a Video Game is probably a sub-class of
> schema:SoftwareApplication. Of course, there are many other things that
> could be modeled on video games, such as levels, objectives and weapons,
> but having a concrete class for describing them would be quite useful.
>

Since the Wikia communities are the real domain experts here do you think
there's any chance they could enumerate these in a public
schema.orgextension proposal?

-jason


>
> Gregg Kellogg
> gregg@greggkellogg.net
>
>
>