Re: Support for URLs per language or region in schema.org

Hi Aaron, in addition to our discussion on Github:

We could simply add schema:WebPage (or schema:Thing) to the range of all (or most) properties that  accept schema:URL as a datatype. Then, you can model different values for different languages or devices by simply adding an additional schema:WebPage node instead of the raw URL, which can hold the language and other meta-data.

Martin

-----------------------------------
martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org          @mfhepp







> On 01 Jun 2015, at 21:08, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A extremely common scenario for large organizations with a web presence is that they have different URLs for the same resource based on a users' language, region, or both.
> 
> Same organization, different pages for different languages:
> http://www.un.org/en/index.html
> http://www.un.org/fr/index.html
> 
> Same organization, different pages for different different regions:
> http://www.apple.com/ca/
> http://www.apple.com/au/
> 
> Same organization, different pages for different different language/region combinations:
> http://www.ibm.com/ca/en/
> http://www.ibm.com/ca/fr/
> 
> Is there a way in schema.org, using any of the supported syntaxes, to declare different URLs ("url" property) for different web resources published by the same organization, or for different identifiers for a organization ("sameAs" property)?
> 
> It appears not.
> 
> schema.org does have properties supporting the declaration of the language or region for specific resources, but they're not broadly applicable, and in any case http://schema.org/URL, as a text type, does not support the declaration of properties:
> 
> http://schema.org/inLanguage
> https://schema.org/availableLanguage
> https://schema.org/areaServed
> 
> So, say, with ContactPoint a publisher is able to declare for a single Organization that that are different phone numbers for Canada and Australia, but not able to say that there are separate websites for them.
> 
> This hasn't been a huge issue until now, but is becoming more prevalent as more data consumers are able to ingest JSON-LD, whereby information about an entity can be presented all in one code block, regardless of whether or not all that information is included on the page.  (JSON-LD's @language and @value keys makes this task magnificently easy for strings, but isn't applicable to URLs).
> 
> Google, for example, allows organizations and people to declare their social media accounts [1], but has no provision for specifying multiple accounts on a per-language or per-region basis.
> 
> Is there a case to be made for URLs to be qualified by language or region?  I think so, but maybe I'm missing either a principle that mitigates against doing so or, conversely, a method by which this may already be accomplished.
> 
> I initially raised this tangentially in a comment on an issue related to language support for EntryPoint [2], but have broadened the scope here.
> 
> [1] https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/social-profiles
> [2] https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/561#issuecomment-107618227
>

Received on Thursday, 4 June 2015 10:41:39 UTC