Re: The Agent proposal in bib.schema.org is controversial

On 10 August 2015 at 14:18, Richard Wallis
<richard.wallis@dataliberate.com> wrote:
> You may have noticed if you followed the recent announcement of Schema.or
> v2.1, which includes bib.schema.org, that one of our proposals did not make
> it in.  That proposal being the Agent type that we proposed as a super-type
> for Person and Organization.
>
> Agent has been a theme of discussion in the community well before we
> approached the issue.  You can follow the recent debate in the related
> schemaorg git issue comment trail:
> https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/700
>
> In the bibliographic world Agent is a well understood, some would say
> obvious, approach.  When applied to the wider domains that Schema.org
> embraces however, it raises many concerns and issues. Especially because, as
> proposed, it would introduce a new direct sub-type of Thing with
> ramifications that could cascade across many areas of the  vocabulary.
>
> In my personal opinion the gap between the two apposing views on this is
> significant and the best way forward would be to consider possible pragmatic
> approaches to how we represent our data in Schema.org without loosing the
> ability to describe our resources effectively to the wider world.
>
> In simple terms, if we identify an author, creator, publisher, or even
> copyright holder as a Person or an Organization there is not a problem.  The
> difficulty occurs when we know from the relationships in the data that they
> are either a Person or an Organization but cannot identify which.
>
> One suggested way forward for such a circumstance would be to define them as
> a schema:Thing.  To me this feels a little too vague.  A follow-on option
> was to suggest a 'personOrOrganization' boolean property to indicate this
> circumstance.  This is a little more appealing, but I think it still needs
> some work.
>
> What are others thoughts on this?
>
> Do we believe that the proposed Agent type is the only way forward?  Are
> there potential pragmatic options like the one I describe above that we
> could shape, that would be acceptable? Is this requirement to specifically
> describe agents as too detailed and something we can pass over, and move on
> to other things?

In particular if we've missed in
https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/700 any concrete
arguments in favour of adding an Agent type (+ specific candididate
definitions), let's get those arguments recorded. For general
discussion, mail here is probably better than filling up the github
issue.

cheers,

Dan

> ~Richard.
>
>
>
> Richard Wallis
> Founder, Data Liberate
> http://dataliberate.com
> Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
> Twitter: @rjw

Received on Monday, 10 August 2015 12:29:12 UTC