Re: Itemprop for person

On 12 Nov 2012, at 16:31, Richard Wallis <richard.wallis@oclc.org> wrote:

> I think that 'better description', which should lead to better discovery, is the key to much of what we are about in this group.

I'm going to challenge this once, but if the consensus of the group is against me, I'll try to shut up!

I don't agree it is enough to just aim for 'better description', because I don't think it tells us enough about what we should do as a priority - there are so many things we could describe, and we know from many years of experience in libraries that much of the effort that goes into description is not actually used.

To try to give an example. In the question of describing people/organisations as fictional - what are the likely questions this might help answer? I can pose two scenarios that might be helped:

I want to find fictional writing about detectives
I want to find non-fiction writing about fictional detectives

However, I would suggest that only the second is really supported by the ability to label a person as 'fictional'. The first is much better served (IMO) by labelling a creativework as fiction (which I guess could already be done via the genre property). This latter approach also avoid having to deal with the trickier issues of fictional representations of real people (who knew that W.A. Mozart also did detective work? http://www.wakefieldlibrary.org/lists/zrarealdetectives.htm)

Anyway - my point is really to argue one of these is more valid than the other - both are valid scenarios but I contend they are supported by different kinds of 'better description'. This is why I think it is important that we try to explore the purpose of extending schema.org beyond 'better description' if we are going to prioritise and come up with focused proposals for extensions that are likely to see take up.

I'd be interested in others thoughts, and as I say, I'm happy to leave it here having put in my 2pennies

Owen