Re: EOCred: Identifying subtypes of credential

On 26 January 2018 at 09:54, Phil Barker <phil.barker@pjjk.co.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On 25/01/18 14:29, Fritz Ray wrote:
>
> 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). 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).
>
>
I totally recognise and agree with Phil’s description of [what is often
unsatisfactory] reality in this area and some of the reasons for the
successful growth of Schema.org.


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)
>

I agree with Phil here.


>
> 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.
>

credentialClass & credentialType are very semantically similar however, the
default terminology within Schema.or is for “*a Type of thing*”, not “*a
Class of thing*” — starting to talk about classes of things would seem odd
to the Schema.org community and very likely to result in suggestions to
change the name of *credentialClass* to *credentialType*.

~Richard.