Re: EOCred: Identifying subtypes of credential

On 25/01/18 14:29, Fritz Ray wrote:
> Sure. I posted my work here.
>
> https://github.com/Lomilar/schemaorg/blob/8dd7f243103c1e997e22189b56f453d599b74762/data/ext/pending/issue-1779.rdfa
> [...]
Thanks Fritz, that helped me clarify what you're thinking. It seems 
technically correct and based on reasonable assumptions.
>
> I concede that this is a fairly 'puritan' approach to typing, and that 
> it presumes a certain complexity of the technology used to interpret 
> these objects (namely to interpret class structures inside and outside 
> schema.org <http://schema.org>). It also presumes a willingness for 
> organizations with particular definitions to extend schema objects 
> with those particularities. If publishing schemas were as simple as 
> publishing data, this wouldn't be a problem, but alas.
Yes, these for me are the killer problems. Long experience shows that 
convincing organizations to publish schemas is very difficult and 
progress is slow to none existent. I think the presumption of 
willingness is wrong (the RDFSchema spec is 20 years old in April, 
they've had long enough to do it if they wanted). The problem this 
causes becomes worse when you consider that (especially in schema.org 
use cases) it may not be the organization providing the credential that 
wants to provide information about them. One reason schema.org massively 
increased the provision of RDF / linked data has been the tendency to 
favour approaches which make it easier to provide data (even when at 
some cost in terms of rigor or ease of consuming data).

>
> If this argument fails to convince, perhaps a rename to 
> 'credentialTerm' to get it away from the connotations of type? I 
> really want some property of Thing like "alsoCalledA" that allows one 
> to provide a preferred name for the class of thing it is (commonly 
> found as options in the description, see CreativeWork's description, 
> for instance).
Happy to explore naming options, but I think it is important that the 
term label does not obscure the intent of the property. Some options...

cedentialTypeTerm (since we're pointing to a DefinedTerm--note, IMO 
schema's loose approach to defining Range makes putting the expected 
range into the term name problematic)

credentialCategory (maybe a subtype of category 
<http://schema.org/category>)

credentialClass (yeah, I know, Class not much different to Type)

Personally, I am not sure I prefer any of those to credentialType, but 
if renaming is the route to a compromise solution it would be worth 
considering. One thing I might say in favour of credentialType is that 
it makes the compromise involved explicit.

Would keeping the term name but changing the definition help:
credentialType : a term describing the type of credential, for example 
"degree”, “certificate”, “badge”, or more specific term.

Regards, Phil.

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