Re: Three steps

Jason,

As per Karen¹s recent example, I would suggest the recommendation [if you
only have an author name string] would be to nest a Person with a name
attribute.  That way you are adding the value of saying that the author is a
Person in addition to the string that represents their name.

~Richard


On 28/11/2012 15:52, "Jason Ronallo" <jronallo@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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:
>> 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.
> 
>