Re: Comics and periodicals in schema.org (was Re: journal article for next call?)

Hi Peter!

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:57 PM, Olson, Peter <polson@marvel.com> wrote:
> Hi Dan -
>
> This looks very promising.  I had some questions/comments (I also don't have rights to edit the Bibex wiki for some reason):

Good to hear (the "very promising" bit, that is)! As for Bibex wiki
editing rights, I could move the proposal over to the WebSchemas wiki
if that would work better for you & anyone else you worked with on the
original Comics / Serials proposal.

> Definition of Comic Series - this may be just a terminology thing in the example, but I don't think we or the comics community would consider the Amazing Spider-Man storyline listed as a distinct series.  We have two distinct Amazing Spider-Man series, one which started in 1963 and one which started in 1999 (http://marvel.com/comics/series/1987/amazing_spider-man_1963_-_1998 and http://marvel.com/comics/series/454/amazing_spider-man_1999_-_2013).  We generally consider storylines to be a smaller organizational unit distinct from series.
>

Okay, I was following the basic tutorial at comics.org
(http://docs.comics.org/wiki/OI_Tutorial#How_do_I_create_my_first_index.3F)
where it mentions searching for "Muppet Show" by Series Name, and
three of the first four results are series for the same "The Muppet
Show" comic published by Boom! in 2009, with the first series having
four issues, and the next two series having one issue each. As I
warned in my initial email, I worried that I might be drawing too much
from that example! (For what it's worth, I had looked up "The Amazing
Spider-Man" at the time and saw that it had one huge series starting
in 1963, so I was confused!)

I was worrying that perhaps there was no need for a Comic /
ComicSeries split after all. Do cases like "7 Brothers"
(http://www.comics.org/series/name/7%20brothers/sort/alpha/) where a
set of 5 issues was published in 2007, and another set of 5 issues was
published in 2008 justify continuing to have ComicSeries match with
PeriodicalVolume, and to have a separate Comic as a peer of
Periodical? Maybe.

> (Storylines generally are complicated because they often don't stay neatly within the comics' bibliographic structures.  I gave a talk a while back that touches on some of these issues here, if you're morbidly curious: http://new.livestream.com/hugeinc/events/2474611)

I am morbidly curious and will check that out.

> Definition of Comic - There's some potential for ambiguity here so I wanted to dig down on some specific examples.  Often several comic series are published simultaneously with very similar names.  For example, we currently publish the following:
> X-Men
> Uncanny X-Men
> Ultimate X-Men
> X-Men Legacy
>
> If I'm reading the proposal right, each of those would be distinct comics (each containing one or more distinct series).

Yes, that's what I was thinking.

> Another example - over the years we published a series of Comic Series in which the titles changed but the numbering was continuous: X-Men -> New X-Men  -> X-Men -> X-Men Legacy -> X-Men (again see the talk, which lists out a few more examples).  Under the definition in the proposal each distinct title would be a distinct Comic, correct?

Fascinating! Yes, I think each title would be a distinct Comic in that
case. Maybe we'll need some sort of relatedWork mechanism sooner
rather than later after all. From http://docs.comics.org/wiki/Tracking
it looks like "Continues from" / "Continues in" covers the
relationships that comics.org cares about, although it carries series
name, publisher, and date with each relationship.

How would that have been handled in the original proposal: separate
ComicSeries for each title change, I guess?

> Comic Stories - because stories can be and are reprinted, the original comic issue in which they appeared should probably be identified in the schema.  For example, the Spider-Man origin story has been reprinted hundreds of times, but it's always "from" Amazing Fantasy #15.

That sounds very reasonable; so something like an
"originallyPublishedIn" property that should only be used if there are
more than one "partOfComicIssue" / "partOfPeriodicalIssue" properties,
to identify the ur-comic (or periodical, as that could be useful for
non-comic articles as well)?

> It might be worthwhile looking at the comics.org schema as well: http://docs.comics.org/wiki/Current_Schema

As someone who cut his first-career teeth developing a relational
database for 8 years, *yes*, it's always worthwhile looking at
database schemas (I will pretend that I'm not seeing the "recalculated
by code on data updates" statements) :)

Hey, there is a "Story" table in the schema. That makes me feel better
about having a ComicStory type, then!

Many thanks again for your contributions, Peter!

Dan

Received on Friday, 6 December 2013 05:54:34 UTC