Re: Three steps

Just to add support to Jason's note, the "itemid" property he included 
in his last example would be ideal, but not mandatory.

We can model People/Organizations, and their relations to CreativeWorks, 
per the current Schema.org guidelines.  It's just that those libraries 
that do not have the technological capability to either mint a URI for a 
Person/Organization or make use of an already minted URI for the same 
can omit the "href" or "itemid" property.  In RDF terms, it just results 
in a blank node.  Perhaps not ideal, but perfectly acceptable.

In any event, the examples at the bottom of http://schema.org/Book for 
"Reviews" omit the "Person" itemtype construct altogether for a simple 
lexical string.

Yours,

Kevin



On 11/28/2012 09:52 AM, Jason Ronallo 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
> <mailto: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.
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2012 15:30:34 UTC