Including electronic resources in holdings-as-offers

Hello:

Sparked by a question from Ed Summers in IRC, I thought this would be
worth running past the group.

When we initially talked about expressing holdings, we took the
(reasonable) shortcut of just using the "url" property for the
Book/MusicAlbum/descendant-of-Thing to point at the available
electronic resource, and tackled the holdings-as-Offers route for the
more physical resources.

However, Ed is generating a JSON-LD list of holdings for a set of
institutions, and it seems clear in that use case that it would be
useful for clients to be able to parse the list of electronic and
physical holdings in the same way.

So, I'm thinking of adding a bit of description and an example to
https://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/Holdings_via_Offer -
something like:

"""
**Electronic resources**

You can use the 'url' property of the CreativeWork to link directly to
the available representation of the work.

However, if you need to represent the physical and electronic holdings
in a consistent fashion, you can also list the electronic resources as
part of the holdings-as-Offer pattern. Specify "availability" as
http://schema.org/OnlineOnly and "url" as the URL for the work, as in
the following example:

 <table vocab="http://schema.org/">

   <!-- Example of an electronically available copy -->
   <tr property="offers" typeof="http://schema.org/Offer">
     <td><a property="url"
href="http://example.com/online/resource">Available online</a>
       <link property="availability" href="http://schema.org/OnlineOnly">
       <div>Library: <span property="seller">Main branch</span></div>
       <link property="businessFunction"
href="http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#LeaseOut">
     </td>
   </tr>

     <!-- Example of a physical copy available for loan -->
     <tr property="offers" typeof="Offer">
       <th>Copy </th>
       <td>Available
         <link property="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock">
         <div>Library: <span property="seller">Example Bookmobile 1</span></div>
         <div>Barcode: <span property="serialNumber">CONC91000937</span></div>
         <div>Call number: <span property="sku">780 R2</span></div>
         <link property="businessFunction"
href="http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#LeaseOut">
       </td>
     </tr>
 <table>
"""

Here's the one wrinkle: taking this approach, the "url" in this markup
is technically (I believe) the URL of the Offer itself, not of the
item being offered. However, it seems like the most straighforward
approach that enables one to present the structured data in a
consistently consumable fashion, so I'm very tempted to recommend
this.

Does anyone have strong objections and a better approach to recommend?

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2014 16:59:00 UTC