Re: journal article for next call?

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 5:09 AM, Owen Stephens <owen@ostephens.com> wrote:
> Thanks for this Dan. I'm afraid I can't make the call today but I had a
> question - why is 'Issuance' under 'Intangible' and not 'CreativeWork'?

Great question Owen!

My rationale was that I was hoping to avoid the mass of properties you
inherit from CreativeWork, with the goal of guiding users of these
types towards consistent usage patterns (that is to say, keeping data
about the Periodical at the Periodical level, and data about the
Article at the Article level, and keeping a bare minimum of data at
the Issuance level). Of the CreativeWork properties, "datePublished"
was the most obviously useful one.

Last night I was musing that "editor" may also come into play at the
level of a given Issuance and probably should be drafted into Issuance
as well; but the rest of the properties seem more appropriate to be
applied to the Periodical as a whole, or to the individual Articles
within the given Issuance.

I thought the Series / Episode pattern might be instructive for our
Periodical / Issuance. Episode inherits from CreativeWork, but the
more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that an Episode really
is a standalone CreativeWork, whereas a given issue of a periodical is
generally not much more than a collection of individual CreativeWorks.
To be sure, the editor of a given issue does put their stamp on the
end result, puts in a tremendous amount of labour coordinating efforts
of the various contributors, and often guides the subject matter
chosen for that issue, but it seems like a stretch to call the issue a
CreativeWork.

However, if we do opt to go with the "Issuance inherits from
CreativeWork" route, then I would argue that "pagination" should
simply be added to CreativeWork. (Yes, this leads to movies or
sculptures with paginations... ah well, maybe it's a flip-book
animation, or a sculpture made out of numbered pieces of paper!)

One other note on naming: I went with "Issuance" rather than "Issue"
to avoid claiming the namespace that might also be desired by bug
trackers or international policy metadata. Those in a position of
marking up individual issues of a periodical seem likely to be able to
deal with "Issuance" as a term.

Dan

Received on Thursday, 21 November 2013 14:31:07 UTC