Why we want to have separate Periodical and (Periodical)Issu(e|ance) types

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
<snip>

> Actually, I was wondering about the utility of:
>
> [sketchy example begins]
>
> Periodical
>   name
>   issuance
>     volume
>     number
>     date
>
> vs.
>
> Periodical
>   name
>   volume
>   number
>   date

Yes, you have mentioned this a number of times now. As I said on the
call, we're working with structured data. One benefit lies in being
able to define Periodical as an entity in and of itself, then refer to
it from the separate issues, instead of repeating the core Periodical
information in each instance of an issue (and worse, in each instance
of an article in each instance of a Periodical). If you refer to two
separate issues of the same periodical on the same page, and you
haven't broken Periodical out separately from Issue, then you have to
repeat all that core Periodical information with slightly different
volume / number / date information. You could determine that they're
the same Periodical by comparing their ISSN and name, I suppose, but
that seems like a very twisted and artificial way to achieve what
should be a very basic operation.

Someone else (sorry, I forget who) mentioned that structured data is
meant for consumption by machines, not humans, which seemed to be part
of your concern about this separation of Periodical and Issue. I think
you had also expressed concern about the use case of the professor
trying to mark up their list of publications who might get confused by
the idea of an Issue as separate from a Periodical; my response to
that was, yes, there is some sympathy for manually-generated markup,
but the bulk of schema.org is expected to be generated by
applications--so whoever is enabling the publication of schema.org is
going to be expected to spend some wrapping their heads around the
schemas. And Corey noted that applications are likely to be able to do
more with the resulting data if it has more structure than if it is
simply flattened.

For me, it often comes down to a very basic sniff test. Is the idea of
an issue of a periodical something that normal humans would recognize
as being separate from the periodical itself? I think that, yes, most
humans would pretty easily recognize and distinguish "The New York
Times" as something that is published regularly from "last Sunday's
edition of The New York Times" as a particular instance of.that
publication--separate, but connected to the idea of the publication in
general. That, in and of itself, is enough justification for me to
want to reflect those separate entities in schema.org.

Received on Friday, 22 November 2013 01:43:31 UTC