Re: Three steps

Apologies if this has been over-discussed already - I only just joined
the group - but after reading
<http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#schemaorg_expected> this morning, I
was under the impression that any property could be either an object,
a URL or a string, and that it should be straightforward to
distinguish between the different forms by the presence of an
itemscope/itemtype attribute.

Re: example markup, I've started marking up MEDLINE articles with
MedicalScholarlyArticle markup, e.g.
<http://pubmed.macropus.org/23155443>, and can easily add any possible
extra markup for demonstration purposes.

I've also just posted a first attempt at a JSON example of how I'd
roughly like the extracted metadata to look, eventually:
<https://gist.github.com/4161257>. It's using a mix of BIBFRAME's
Work/Instance concepts, MODS properties and various other things...

Alf

On 28 November 2012 12:09, 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:
>
> How to describe what we have, using Schema as it is
> What changes/enhancements, if any, to Schema could we propose to improve the
> description [and pragmatically expect the Schema group to accept]
> 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 15:31:08 UTC