Re: Three steps

Richard,

It seems to me that Schema.org is already relaxed about these kinds of
problems. The value of the author property is _expected_ to be a Person or
Organization. Consuming applications on the other hand should expect to get
imperfect data, though. Even the Schema.org documentation for a book uses a
relative URL from the href to refer to the author. Here's a snippet:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
  <span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>
  by <a itemprop="author" href="/author/jd_salinger.html">J.D. Salinger</a>
</div>

But maybe this is a bug?

As a consuming application I would also expect to see something like this
where a string is used:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
  <span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>
  by <span itemprop="author">J.D. Salinger</span>
</div>

But if you are an implementer, read the documentation, and all you have is
an author name as a string, there is nothing keeping you from being more
exact with that and doing something like the following. This is probably
what the recommendation ought to be if you only have an author name as a
string.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
  <span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>
  by <span itemprop="author" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span
itemprop="name">J.D. Salinger</span></span>
</div>

If you also have some kind of identifier for the person, then you could add
an itemid:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Book">
  <span itemprop="name">The Catcher in the Rye</span>
  by <span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"
itemid="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50016589"><span
itemprop="name">J.D. Salinger</span></span>
</div>

So while recommendations to the community would be to be as exact as
possible there is no requirement that it be so strict.

Jason



On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Richard Wallis <richard.wallis@oclc.org>wrote:

>  I’m 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 Karen’s real situation of only having an
> author string – plus possibly a few in-between.  I believe that it would be
> possible to satisfy Schema’s 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.
>