Re: Course, a new dawn?

On 25 February 2016 at 18:23, Vicki Tardif Holland <vtardif@google.com> wrote:
> I am concerned that in the name of simplicity, we are losing the ability to
> understand the various things a Course may be:
>
> 1. The abstract notion (e.g. "HNC Accounting").
> 2. A specific session of the Course (e.g. HNC Accounting taught at St
> Brycedale Campus Kirkcaldy starting 2016-08-29).
> 3. An offer to sell access to a Course. In the online world, this is usually
> a specific session.
>
> As the examples are written, I cannot tell the difference between
> definitions 1) and 2), particularly because the first example gives dates.
>
> I think we need to move back to a model where there is:
>
> 1. Course which is a subtype of CreativeWork
> 2. CourseOffering (or CourseSession if Offering is too close to Offer)
> which is a subtype of Event
> 3. Use the "offers" property on CreativeWork and Event to allow someone to
> specify an Offer to sell access to a Course or CourseSession as appropriate.
>
> - Vicki

+1 from me on maintaining these distinctions. If we "define Course as
a subtype of both Creative Work and Event" we are effectively saying
that each and every course is simultaneously a creative work (roughly,
document) as well as also being an event. It is similar to the trick
we use already in schema.org where every LocalBusiness is
simultaneously an Organization and a Place. Courses do indeed have
aspects (especially their syllabus) which are closer to documents, and
aspects which are closer to events, but we lose too much by flattening
everything into a single Course type that subclasses both. The
distinctions Vicki stresses here would be important for any
substantive use of the schema.org data - in Web search or elsewhere.
--Dan

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2016 18:34:23 UTC