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

Jeff, Jeff, et al.,

Thanks for your replies, and thanks for the info about the 720 field!
That's fascinating that there are so many. I'm not sure I've ever even seen
a 720 in the wild.

I completely understand about the value of precise types for
reconciliation, though I'm not sure "agent" would necessarily help in this
case. Presumably, if you're trying to reconcile some random data, you've
got other ways to sift out your agents from your topics from your places.
Similar for the publisher info. Data is in publisher, it's either an org or
a person, and we don't know which. I'm still not sure I see what value an
abstract agent class adds in this case.

I'm also a bit surprised this reconciliation question is such a major use
case. I'd think most reconciliation would be upstream of aggregating data
and publishing as schema.org. As I noted before, I would hope that we're
not looking at schema as our native model for data storage. I'd think we
will map to schema from a more expressive, domain specific model. This
could include agent if we really thought it necessary.

Similarly, for downstream users of data who want to do their own
reconciliation, do we imagine that there are data providers that will only
offer schema.org representations of their data? If so, I think that merits
a larger conversation, as I don't recall that ever being a goal of the
original schema.org bib extension activity.

Best,
-Corey



On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 3:32 PM, Jeff Mixter <jeffmixter@gmail.com> wrote:

> Having used open source reconciliation tools like Open Refine to clean up
> and enhance DC data I would like to echo Jeff Y's concern about just using
> schema:Thing. Although one could help limit the number of possibilities by
> searching for schema:Thing with a predicate of schema:author,
> schema:creator etc. this is not really a viable alternative for cleaning up
> data (since no tools make use of it).
>
> Cory, with regards to some of those ~70 Million. You would be surprised at
> how creative some of the MARC records are :)
>
> Also a lot of those come from other parts of the MARC record. A good
> example is a 260 field that has the Publisher information. One can not
> assume that the publisher is always an Organization and there is no
> sub-field code to indicate if the $b is a Person or Organization.
> Alternatively, I would argue that it is possible to assume that the
> publisher is some sort of Agent.
>
> Jeff Mixter
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Corey A Harper <corey.harper@nyu.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> My $0.02: I also think that schama:Thing is the best option at this time,
>> and don't think we should push too much on Agent given what I consider
>> relatively limited usefulness. I understand Jeff's point about the dangers
>> of "not sorting these out", but I also think that we can store and manage
>> data with whatever specifity we want, and I'm not sure those dangers apply
>> to data as published downstream to consumers on the Web.
>>
>> I'm also _very_ interested in knowing more about the 70 Million +
>> "mystery agents" Richard and Jeff have been referencing. Are these just 1xx
>> and 7xx data points that are type unknown because they haven't matched a
>> known entity with a known type? Can't we at least infer more about their
>> type by their Marc field? Can we see some example instance (bib) data where
>> these show up?
>>
>> Best,
>> -Corey
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Dan Scott <denials@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> FWIW, the Bibliographic Ontology (bibo) also uses foaf:Agent.
>>>
>>> But I concur with the developing dissenting opinion on the github issue
>>> that, if we have nothing specific to say about the nature of the entity
>>> because we lack the information, it's better to simply avoid the compromise
>>> of Agent. We might make ourselves feel a bit better about the dismal state
>>> of our bibliographic data through an abstract class like Agent, but in the
>>> end it doesn't really add any data to the data we're trying to express.
>>>
>>> Using schema:Thing seems like an acceptable fallback in the mean time,
>>> and allows the data expressed by the target links to be refined to either
>>> Person or Organization at some point in the future when the effort occurs.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, 10 Aug 2015 at 11:29 Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I made an argument that the problem is broader than bib records:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/700#issuecomment-129078302
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Limiting to our situation, though, Richard cites the count from
>>>> WorldCat at 72 million “agents” (people and organizations excluded):
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/700#issuecomment-129227478
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> These all have Linked Data identifiers, but they are only mechanized
>>>> placeholders in need of exposure, reconciliation, and enrichment.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The danger of not sorting these out is that naïve automated “entity
>>>> matching” processes resort to string matching on name as an “else
>>>> condition” and the resulting mix up manifests itself in the Linked Data.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I suggested Google Custom Search as a possible tool to help with
>>>> discovery and possibly lead to an interface where they could be reconciled:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/700#issuecomment-129239474
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Jeff
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *From:* LeVan,Ralph
>>>> *Sent:* Monday, August 10, 2015 10:33 AM
>>>> *To:* Young,Jeff (OR); Richard Wallis; public-schemabibex@w3.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *Subject:* RE: The Agent proposal in bib.schema.org is controversial
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> One of the arguments against Agent was that if you didn’t know what
>>>> kind of object a thing was, then you just shouldn’t say.   All the
>>>> properties of Agent seem to come from Thing.  I’d propose that we just use
>>>> Thing.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> My guess is that the need for Agent comes mostly from our need to
>>>> convert existing bib records into RDF and some of our crappy old bib
>>>> records don’t reliably distinguish the type of agent involved.  Rather than
>>>> be caught out in a lie about whether the agent is a Person or Organization,
>>>> we’d rather say less.  This is a problem peculiar to our situation and not
>>>> a broad problem of the internet community.  It’s also a short-term
>>>> problem.  Selling ‘Agent’ to a community that doesn’t need it is going to
>>>> be an uphill battle.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What’s wrong with dropping all the way back to Thing when we don’t know
>>>> the type of the agent?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ralph
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *From:* Young,Jeff (OR) [mailto:jyoung@oclc.org <jyoung@oclc.org>]
>>>> *Sent:* Monday, August 10, 2015 10:04 AM
>>>> *To:* Richard Wallis; public-schemabibex@w3.org
>>>> *Subject:* RE: The Agent proposal in bib.schema.org is controversial
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 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
>>>> <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
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Corey A Harper
>> Metadata Services Librarian
>> New York University Libraries
>> 20 Cooper Square, 3rd Floor
>> New York, NY 10003-7112
>> 212.998.2479
>> corey.harper@nyu.edu
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Jeff Mixter
> jeffmixter@gmail.com
> 440-773-9079
>



-- 
Corey A Harper
Metadata Services Librarian
New York University Libraries
20 Cooper Square, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10003-7112
212.998.2479
corey.harper@nyu.edu