Re: Email Message Definition?

On 5/16/14 3:23 PM, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On 16 May 2014 19:32, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@openlinksw.com>  wrote:
>> >On 5/16/14 1:27 PM, Dan Brickley wrote:
>> >On 16 May 2014 17:59, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@openlinksw.com>  wrote:
>>> >>Is this [1] the definition of an Email, or this just an error?
>> >
>> >"An email message."
>> >
>> >Short and sweet. Is there more that you think it should usefully say?
>> >
>> >At this stage we have not got into the business of representing mail
>> >headers, although that could turn out to be interesting.
>> >
>> >Dan
>> >
>> >
>> >But I am not seeing a single recognizable Email Message attribute, hence my
>> >question. Another route to my confusion is by using a CTRL+F (or Command F)
>> >sequence to search on the pattern: Email, there are only two hits:
>> >
>> >Thing > CreativeWork > EmailMessage
>> >An email message.
>> >
>> >The properties table doesn't have a single hit i.e., its basically describes
>> >a 'Creative Work' .
>> >
>> >Hoping this clarifies my concerns.
> Ah, sure. In many classic modeling setups, it is a perfectly good rule
> of thumb to say "don't create a subtype unless you have something new
> to say!". And certainly some areas of schema.org do seem to go deeper
> than was needed. But I think here we can be excused, as there are
> other reasons that favour the addition of named types sometimes, even
> without (initially) populating them with properties.
>
> However, talking about EmailMessage: it is essentially a sibling to
> accompanyhttp://schema.org/WebPage  and serves to indicate the
> evolution of schema.org from being primarily about Web markup, to also
> addressing markup-via-email, e.g. the recently announcement from
> Bing/Cortanahttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn632191.aspx  or
> last year's gmail launch which used EmailMessage (and an early draft
> of the Actions schema), e.g.
> https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/reference/one-click-action
>
> In the case of EmailMessage it might make sense in future to go deeper
> and model more email structure, but even having a simple type and no
> properties can be useful. For another (google) use of schema.org named
> types, googlecustomsearch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/create-search-engine-with-schemaorg.html
> lets you create custom search engines keyed off of the type name.
> Here's one I made to search the (small!) number of sites that use
> http://schema.org/Volcano  :http://danbri.org/2014/cse/volcano.html
> ... The current "make a custom search engine" UI has special case
> support for concepts that are types (e.g. Volcano, ...), but not for
> complex expressions using types alongside qualifying properties (Place
> + volcanicity=true ...).
>
> For schema.org's uses, the fact that types get a nice simple syntax in
> HTML makes them attractive, even if you could theoretically model
> things better using a supertype + additional properties.
>
> A final point: although schema.org might not yet define properties for
> the EmailMessage type, it does provide an attachment point for others
> to do exactly that. And if those properties were popular, we could go
> ahead and reflect them into schema.org.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
Dan,

I get the point re. just having a Type, but in reality, there's always 
at least one attribute, even it it boils down to what's expressed here:

## Turtle Start ##

<http://schema.org/EmailMessage#this> rdfs:subClassOf 
<http://schema.org/CreativeWork#this> .
<http://schema.org/EmailMessage#this> a owl:Class .
<http://schema.org/EmailMessage#this> rdfs:label "EmailMessage" .
<http://schema.org/EmailMessage#this> rdfs:comment "An email message".

## Turtle End ##

Which for all intents an purposes boils down to adding a comment 
attribute to the <http://schema.org/EmailMessage#this> properties table. 
Net effect,  the sentence "An email message." and label "EmailMessage" 
become  distinguishing attributes of the class in question.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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