Three steps

I¹m stepping out of the thread that seems to have developed an all
encompassing life of its own [Itemprop for person] to pick up on an issue
identified in the recent contributions between Karen and myself.

This is the example of how to represent the author when marking up a work
(for now lets assume a book with person as an author).

I said that the author property of the Book should be a URI to a description
of a Person (either a local Person description that onward links to
authority like VIAF, or a direct link to an authority).

Karen, quite rightly came, back to say that a library may only have a string
of characters for the author name so can not do what I describe.

This sort of scenario leads me to suggest that we approach such descriptive
challenges in a three step process:

1. How to describe what we have, using Schema as it is
2. What changes/enhancements, if any, to Schema could we propose to improve
the description [and pragmatically expect the Schema group to accept]
3. Provide examples/recipes for how the markup would look in each case

Applying this to the Book->author problem....

Step 1.
schema:Book->author is a property that requires a link to a Person or
Organization ­ not a literal string.   Therefore example markup would
require links to Person description either externally supplied or created
locally on the fly.

Step 2.
We only have a string for an author name, so why not suggest that Schema
relaxes the restrictions on Book->author to enable the use of strings.
Taking account of the underlying philosophy behind Schema (Things not
Strings), it is exceedingly unlikely that such a proposal would be accepted
as it would break their related entities model of the world.

Step 3.
We need to provide examples of how we would markup various situations that
would cope with my ideal view and Karen¹s real situation of only having an
author string ­ plus possibly a few in-between.  I believe that it would be
possible to satisfy Schema¹s need for a Person description (in this case
with only a name property) by creating a description in line on the fly.

I am conscious that as a group we have not been good at sharing example
markup ­  I include me in that, my RDFa is not as good as I would like it to
be ­ how we rectify this is something I ant to address in the next call.
(tomorrow)

~Richard.