RE: Modelling Course and CourseOffering

Hi

After examining the Types under Intangible and CreativeWork, I edge towards Intangible as the most appropriate. 

Looking at the Types of CreativeWork we have artifacts, such as books, games, VisualArtwork, and so on, which would probably include actual real course materials, for example a text book is a CreativeWork, but not a Course (except in very rare cases and with some tweaking of our definition of Course).  On the other hand Intangibles include flight, order, and the key one: JobPosting - this last being very similar conceptually to Course: "A listing that describes a job opening in a certain organization".  I think this one is decisive for me, because, like a Course, it doesn't include materials from the job, but it does include information about the job.

I think the Course / CourseOffering issue is very difficult.  In the XCRI-CAP world we differentiate between them, so a Course has one or more Presentations (closeMatch CourseOffering).  Our reasoning was that a Course is something that might have been validated for several years, so you can have several instances, for example one Presentation starting every academic year until the Course was removed from the University's educational catalogue.  However, in practice we find that on the web, it's the Presentation that's important in the vast majority of cases, because a university or college prospectus deals with one academic year (though this *may* be breaking down a bit now).  A student applies to the Presentation, not the Course.  In XCRI-CAP this is reflected by the fact that most of the Course information can be inherited by the Presentation element.

I suspect that 2 entities is unnecessary.  Looking at the Intangible Things in schema.org and comparing Things that might have a similar structure, I would point to TrainTrip: this Thing is a trip on a commercial train line. It has an arrival platform, a station where it starts and one where it ends, an arrival time, etc, and it strikes me as quite similar to a CourseOffering in concept.  It very obviously relates to what a user wants to find out when going by train.  However, we don't find in schema.org the broader concept of a TrainRoute - an entity representing the London to Edinburgh train route concept, of which multiple TrainTrips would be structural narrower terms.  The user is primarily interested in the TrainTrip, and a service may present TrainTrips as collections, but it's the TrainTrip that's important to the user, and the TrainRoute doesn't need to be modelled (even if it does in the systems of the train operators).

Interestingly our XCRI-CAP model of Course > Presentation has no data elements that are specific only to Course that couldn't be structurally attached to a Presentation.  Qualification and Credit are both elements attached to Course not Presentation, but could be readily linked to Presentation if no Course element existed.

On the web many course pages concatenate the concepts of overarching programme, Course and CourseOffering, such that you'd be hard pressed to prise them apart.  In addition, the difference between Course and CourseOffering is not sufficiently obvious that it makes it easier to use with both than with only one of them.

Subject to it actually working (!), I'd go for just having Thing > Intangible > Course.  However, for simplicity of explanation I'd define it using the CourseOffering definition (whatever we come up with), so that it's called Course but operates like a CourseOffering.

As this is my first foray into schema.org, I'm happy to be called out on this!  If we need to use the one to many relationship between Course > CourseOffering, then I'm probably wrong.

Alan Paull

--

Alan Paull
APS Ltd
80 Fenton Road, Warboys, HUNTINGDON, PE28 2SL, UK
alan@alanpaull.co.uk
07977 120886
Skype: alanepaull
http://www.alanpaull.co.uk


-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Barker [mailto:phil.barker@hw.ac.uk] 
Sent: 09 February 2016 13:02
To: public-schema-course-extend@w3.org
Subject: Modelling Course and CourseOffering

Hello all,
I asked for comments on the use cases, scope description and definition of an educational course [1]. There have been some suggested new use cases and clarification of the scope with respect to aggregations of courses. I have updated the pages on the wiki accordingly. Nudge me if I have forgotten anything or not captured your meaning. If you have any other comment please add them to that thread, but the general shape seems uncontroversial so I would like to start a couple of new discussion threads for how to meet requirements arising from the use cases.

The first of these is around the modelling of courses and course offerings. This is tricky. There have been discussions in a couple of places at least: on Vicki's Google doc proposal [2] and Wes's pull request [3].

Consensus seems limited at the moment to
- we need a schema.org type: Course
- there are abstract and concrete aspects of courses, i.e. the (abstract
) thing that is offered year after year and instantiations of it that run between set dates and at set locations (on- or offline)

Open for discussion:
- should Course be a subtype of Intangible or CreativeWork
- is there a need for a separate type for the instantiation?
   --if there is need, can we agree to call it a CourseOffering?


I propose that we continue the discussion here, but in order to make progress pending an outcome to that discussion (and in the hope of informing the discussion with real world examples) we try the following:
- work with a model that has two new types Course and CourseOffering
- we do not assume any parent for these types yet, but we do try to meet requirements by drawing in properties from other types already in schema.org rather than create new ones. For example, if we want to know what a course is about we use the existing 'about' property form CreativeWork, if we want to know when a CourseOffering runs we use might find something in Event.

At the end of the process we will know what schema type a Course and CourseOffering most looks like, which would be one factor in deciding what it should be a subtype of. We will also know whether they look substantially different.


Do you think that will work?

Phil

1. 
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-schema-course-extend/2016Feb/att-0001/00-part

2. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YWjLzZC8FiTiOwSAETRIEozeqZdn6O8a4fgqK4t5Ss/edit
3. 
https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/pull/972#issuecomment-173560886 & following comments

-- 
Phil Barker           @philbarker
LRMI, Cetis, ICBL     http://people.pjjk.net/phil

Heriot-Watt University

Workflow: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/workflow/




-----
We invite research leaders and ambitious early career researchers to join us in leading and driving research in key inter-disciplinary themes. 
Please see www.hw.ac.uk/researchleaders for further information and how to apply.

Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity number SC000278.

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2016 15:49:03 UTC