RE: Circa. dates

Perhaps the description of schema:roleName could be tweaked to make it more general.

As I see it, schema:Role is a form of reification that can make intractable problems easy again. As it’s description says, It is a way to “represent[] additional information about a relationship or property”. It would be a shame if the possibilities for this was limited by narrow language on schema:roleName.

Jeff

From: Dan Scott [mailto:dan@coffeecode.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 9:57 AM
To: Young,Jeff (OR)
Cc: Karen Coyle; SchemaDot Org
Subject: Re: Circa. dates

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org<mailto:jyoung@oclc.org>> wrote:
One option would be to use schema:Role to split schema:circa in two halves and then use schema:roleName to assign the specific property that is being fudged. It's just another example of what Role is for.

Given that http://schema.org/roleName is defined as "A role played, performed or filled by a person or organization.", that seems like a stretch for Role.

From the perspective of markup mechanics (simplicity being one of the primary reasons for schema.org<http://schema.org> in the first place), asking webmasters to reify date properties via Role for the sake of saying "around 1850" seems much more extreme than just adopting the proposed extension to ISO8601. Reifying the property would also make the use of the otherwise standard <time datetime=""> construct confusing.

Dan