Re: Changes vs. new element

On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm also in favour ofgeneralizing offer.
>
> *But* getting schema.org accept to change a property name like "seller"
> is going to be tricky. This is actually the identifier of the property, so
> if you change it, you can break existing data.
> What is possible is to keep the existing identifier, but add a caveat in
> the definition / scope note.
> Alternatively, if this is not satisfactory, we could ask to add a new
> property at the level of Offer: "freeOfferer" or something like that.
>
> In the end what we submit to schema.org could be a dual proposal: we list
> 'element requirement' and for each of them we indicate what would be
> needed, either for re-use existing elements (and thus generalize their
> definition) or add new ones.


I don't think this is actually as big a deal as people think.  I believe
Offer *already* covers this and it's just poor documentation on the
schema.org site that's obscuring it.

Offer includes a businessFunction http://schema.org/BusinessFunction one
value of which is  http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#LeaseOut.  Viewing a
loan as a zero cost lease seems very natural to me.

For availability location there is http://schema.org/availableAtOrFrom.
 There is also http://schema.org/inventoryLevel which could be used.

I bet everything needed to cover Thad's use case is there if you dig a
little.

Tom