Re: Schema.org v1.6 release candidate: Roles, various fixes, site navigation improvements

On 18 June 2014 19:19, Mark Harrison <mark.harrison@cantab.net> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> Thanks for the update about http://schema.org/Role
>
> On the whole, I think introducing http://schema.org/Role is an improvement, to allow additional context to be added to the role associated with the original predicate such as http://schema.org/actor
>
> There might be other non-static / transient relationships elsewhere in schema.org that are currently being expressed via a simple predicate, where something analogous to a Role is required, just as we already have http://schema.org/Event and http://schema.org/Order (representing a record of a transaction).

Yes, our intent was that the Role type could be applied directly to
such situations. The name of the type does evoke the
sporting/movies/music scenarios, but is also also a more generic sense
of "role" that is a reasonable fit for our usage ("the function
assumed or part played by a person or thing in a particular
situation.").

> However, I think there is now a need to update the documentation for the recently 'overloaded' predicates ( such as http://schema.org/actor ) to mention that a schema:actor property may accept a schema:Person OR a schema:Role as its value and it may ALSO be used with a type of schema:Role.

There are a lot of properties where it is equally applicable, so I'm
not sure spotlighting "actor" (vs "author", "publisher", etc.) is
urgently needed. As Vicky says, it's a tricky balancing act. It might
be that we could do something on the per-property pages with examples
(current we only show examples for types).

> It might also be helpful to provide some guidance that if anyone was using SPARQL queries on RDF data expressed using predicates such as schema:actor , they might need to change the WHERE clause of their query to use (SPARQL v1.1) predicate paths / property chains, to expect schema:actor+ instead of schema:actor , since schema:actor is being re-used to connect a schema:Movie to a schema:Role and a schema:Role to a schema:Person, as well as directly from a schema:Movie to a schema:Person.  Alternatively, a SPARQL query could introduce an intermediate ?role variable and match on
>
>         ?movie schema:actor ?role .
>                 ?role schema:actor ?actor .
>
> in addition to the existing             ?movie schema:actor ?actor  .   pattern that they may already have in their WHERE clause.

I think you've just done that! (i.e. provide guidance). Good point
about v1.1 of SPARQL where schema:actor+ is a nice idiom for working
with Role. I was yesterday looking at other graph navigation
frameworks and how they deal with this - for those interested,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gremlin-users/LId-WybOaDo has
some discussion of Gremlin and Property Graphs, including code
samples. They've used a very similar representation - see eg.
http://www.slideshare.net/slidarko/titan-the-rise-of-big-graph-data/60

> I have prepared a small zip file to illustrate two ways in which existing SPARQL queries can be modified to support the introduction of an intervening node of class http://schema.org/Role
>
> You can download it from http://www.autoidlabs.org.uk/GS1Digital/schema-role-test.zip           and try it out with any SPARQL v1.1 implementation such as Jen ARQ.

works for me, using https://jena.apache.org/download/index.cgi
e.g
sparql --query=oldsparql.rq --data=oldtriples.ttl
sparql --query=newsparql1.rq --data=newtriples.ttl
sparql --query=newsparql2.rq --data=newtriples.ttl


There are also things you can do like

PREFIX schema: <http://schema.org/>
CONSTRUCT {
?movie schema:name ?moviename .
?actor schema:name ?actorname .
?movie schema:actor ?actor }
WHERE { ?movie schema:actor+ ?actor .
?movie schema:name ?moviename .
?actor schema:name ?actorname .
}

... which turn new-style data into old-style data.

> Please feel free to include such guidance to SPARQL users in the schema.org documentation for the introduction of schema:Role , to help users cope with data that does / does not make use of schema:Role .

So far we've tended to keep the main site very 'mainstream webmaster'
oriented, but I'm getting to think it does deserve a page or so for
this more specialized audience of people working with the W3C RDF
specs and technologies. That said we already have links to
http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas which should be writable by anyone
here. So feel free to jump in via the Wiki, and we can link to
interesting entries from schema.org more directly.

> Furthermore, I noticed an inconsistency in the third example in the http://schema.org/Role page - in the JSON-LD example, the predicate is correctly shown as http://schema.org/alumniOf - but for the Microdata and RDFa versions of the same example, the inverse property (http://schema.org/alumni ) is shown by mistake.  This appears to be just a copy-paste error from example 2 on that page.

Thanks - fixed! https://github.com/rvguha/schemaorg/pull/50

> I hope this helps!

Very much :) it's always healthy to have running code and demos to
help people understand complex ideas...

cheers,

Dan

> Best wishes,
>
> - Mark
>
>
> Dr. Mark Harrison
> Senior Research Associate, Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory
> Director, Auto-ID Labs at Cambridge
> Institute for Manufacturing
> University of Cambridge
> 17 Charles Babbage Road
> Cambridge, UK
> CB3 0FS
>
> E-mail:  mark.harrison@cantab.net
> http://www.autoidlabs.org.uk
>
>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2014 19:41:50 UTC