Re: Formulating Antoine's proposal

This could be read as implying three types of offers:

1) sell a product
2) provide a service
3) make an exchange

The 3rd option seems to encompass the 1st two, which seems odd. The concept of "exchange" seems quite right, though. Perhaps incorporating the concept of "transaction" somehow? This wording is awkward, but something like "an offer to transact an exchange of a product or service".

At that point, it occurred to me to check out how GoodRelations dealt with it:

http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1#Offering

I hadn't noticed this before, but they use a much more verbose rdfs:comment to convey the
meaning of the term compared to the one or sentences used in Schema.org<http://Schema.org>:

http://schema.org/Offer

It's also interesting to look at various dictionary definitions of the term and see how words
like this allow for some natural margin of flexibility. Oddly enough, my French dictionary
has a definition that says everything that GoodRelations says in two sentences. Schema.org<http://Schema.org>
would be so much more flexible it was all in French. ;-)

Jeff

Sent via a cracked screen :-(

On Jul 17, 2013, at 9:11 PM, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle@kcoyle.net<mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net>> wrote:

Yes, Antoine, very much agreed. I think that we simply want to know if we have the option of changing such a definition so that it is not limited to "sell." If the consensus of the public-vocab list is that it's too late to make such a change, then we know we need to take a different approach.

I'll suggest:

"An offer to sell a product, provide a service, or make an exchange between parties."

kc

On 7/17/13 3:32 PM, Antoine Isaac wrote:
Hi Karen,


I'm listening to the meeting recording (it's amazing how much more it
makes sense the second time around!). Antoine made a good proposal
about asking the general vocab list about the possibility of modifying
definitions of properties like "offer". Right now, this is the
definition for offer:

"An offer to sell an item-for example, an offer to sell a product, the
DVD of a movie, or tickets to an event."

I think we could describe our case for using offer and ask about the
community's feeling about making the definition a bit more general.



Yes, but as said in the call I'd insist on not describing the case
entirely (i.e, with 150 different attributes, FRBR chains, what have you
not...). Just making the point for motivating that there are 'free
offers' that we'd like to represent using the schema.org/Offer<http://schema.org/Offer> class.
Otherwise the WebSchema guys won't even care reading the email (and
rightfully so).

Cheers,

Antoine




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Karen Coyle
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