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

So to clarify, are you are suggesting that we publish either foaf or
bibliograp.net agent alone, or in addition to schema:Thing  ?

Yes, BiblioGraph.net terms should be superseded when the equivalent terms
are accepted into bib.schema.org beyond the pre-final preview release.

~Richard.

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

On 10 August 2015 at 15:04, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:

> One option would be for us to use foaf:Agent. Presumably search engines
> would ignore it, but that’s their prerogative.
>
>
>
> Another option would be to preserve http://bibliograph.net/Agent, with a
> comment that it wasn’t accepted by the broader community, but remains
> useful in our limited domain. (Terms that have been adopted should be
> deprecated.)
>
>
>
> Jeff
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Richard Wallis [mailto:richard.wallis@dataliberate.com]
> *Sent:* Monday, August 10, 2015 8:18 AM
> *To:* public-schemabibex@w3.org
> *Subject:* The Agent proposal in bib.schema.org is controversial
>
>
>
> You may have noticed if you followed the recent announcement of Schema.or
> v2.1
> <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-schemabibex/2015Aug/0000.html>,
> 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?
>
>
>
> ~Richard.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Richard Wallis
>
> Founder, Data Liberate
>
> http://dataliberate.com
>
> Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
>
> Twitter: @rjw
>