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

The mention of the overlapping and continuing Comic Series of Xmen over the
years, reminded me of the need for a property to hold the "fictional
universe".

I did not see a "fictional universe" that ties all series / brands (from
Peter's schema) / issues / stories.  Work in Progress ? (Comics are
fictional based, so any fiction-based periodical will probably appreciate a
property like that)

We have the "Part of fictional universes" property in Freebase currently.
 As a guide, please read the description along the top of :
https://www.freebase.com/fictional_universe/work_of_fiction?schema=

and let's think about ways to incorporate it within the schema proposal and
where.



On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:54 PM, Dan Scott <denials@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>


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