Written Works and Collections

I do reviews of short science fiction, and to please Google, I make heavy use of schema.org to annotate the data. You can look at any of the reviews here for examples:

http://www.rocketstackrank.com/search/label/Review


This works well enough that Google is showing our ratings in the search snippets, but I’ve found what I think are some shortcomings in the way schema.org handles annotations for written works, particularly for short ones that are usually contained inside larger ones. Is this the right place to discuss that?

For example, I cannot describe a short story as a “Book” because it has no ISBN. (That gets an error from Google.) So I’m forced to call it a “CreativeWork”. That prevents me from giving it an Illustrator.

I can’t call anthologies books either because they have editors but no authors. (Each of the stories that an anthology comprises has an author, of course.)

It almost seems that there should be a distinction between a “WrittenWork” and a “Publication,” where the former would have an author, a word count, a copyright date, etc. but the latter would have a publisher, a publication date, maybe an editor, etc. Even a printed book might contain more than one written work (e.g. the forward and the text of the novel). A magazine is a publication that contains multiple written works, as is an anthology. It’s not impossible to represent this with schema.org, but it’s awkward.

It’s perfectly possible that I’m the one who’s confused, but I skimmed over the last several months of messages in this forum plus did some web searching, and I haven’t found anything that really spoke to the issue.

--Greg

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