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

I think the scenario of interest comes from the [crappy old] data Ralph
describes.

Trawling through/displaying our bib data we identify Person & Organisation
entities from their relationship with a creative work (author, publisher,
etc.).  When describing them, in terms of Schema.org we can state they are
an instance of schemaPerson or schema:Organization.  Then we come across an
entity which is described as an agent (in bib terms) how do we mark that up?

Currently the only option is schema:Thing.

~Richard


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

On 10 August 2015 at 15:41, Owen Stephens <owen@ostephens.com> wrote:

> I’m yet to be convinced of the need for Agent.
>
> Perhaps to start with it would be good to understand what case(s) we are
> trying to address. I’d like to understand if the main situation is:
>
> 1) We have a label for the creator, but we don’t know what sort of thing
> the creator is
> 2) We have a label which we know is sometimes used to refer to an
> organisation and sometimes to a person, but we aren’t sure which in a
> specific case
>
> Owen
>
> Owen Stephens
> Owen Stephens Consulting
> Web: http://www.ostephens.com
> Email: owen@ostephens.com
> Telephone: 0121 288 6936
>
> On 10 Aug 2015, at 13:18, Richard Wallis <richard.wallis@dataliberate.com>
> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>