Other markup in examples

Hi all,

There was some discussion in the Content-Carrier Proposal thread about some
of the other markup I had put in to the examples, that were not directly
needed to describe the proposal.   Specifically sameThingAs and the way I
referenced an author by only adding a VIAF URI.

As I say, these were not totally necessary for the example but come from a
desire to make the examples as real as possible.  Rather than confuse that
thread with off topic comments I thought I would discuss them separately
here.

sameThingAs, as spotted by Jason, is only a proposal at the moment
<http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/sameThingAs>. One that I believe needs
support and use cases, many that can come from our domain.  I used it in my
example to indicate that the thing I was describing was the same thing as as
described in WorldCat, where a much richer description can be found (and
effectively be merged with my description).   By doing this I am
demonstrating real use cases ­ describing how this thing, in my library or
on my publisher web site, is the same as this other thing in the British
Library, Dbpedia, or WorldCat.

I also use it specifically in examples so that you have a link to a rich
description of the thing which, for briefness of example reasons, I only
provide summary details.

As to the sameThingAs proposal itself , it can be argued that it is
unnecessary as owl:sameAs provides the same facility.  This is true if you
are using RDFa only and you miss one of the major advantages of Schema.org ­
the vocabulary to describe most things all in one place.  For those reasons,
and to give the microdata community a consistent equal capability
environment, we should support and promote it.

---

The other issue mentioned was that I used this (RDFa) markup for author:
     <a property="author" href="http://viaf.org/viaf/59083797">Frank
Herbert</a>

I agree that on a web page you may well expect nested markup describing the
author, in this case, as a schema:Person.   However, I believe that the
markup I used is valid, especially if/when VIAF adds schema.org, and
describes the resource at <http://viaf.org/viaf/59083797> as a
schema:Person.  

I did it this way for two reasons.  Firstly to minimise markup that is not
necessary to demonstrate the point in my proposal, and secondly to speed up
my efforts ­ having to write this email meaning that approach backfired ;-)

~Richard.

PS.  For clarification when documenting proposals I am using schemap: as a
prefix to indicate Schema proposed types and properties.