Re: Historical events

Hello all, I've been following this discussion with interest, and can't 
resist jumping in now.

Allison, I wouldn't read too much in to the semantics of a schema.org 
Type based on the properties of that type. Specifically, I wouldn't 
infer that schema.org/Event is a commercial event just because the Event 
type has properties that are relevant only to commercial events. 
Schema.org is generally 'lumping' in its approach to classifying, 
lumping stuff together rather than creating fine distinctions; put this 
together with the inheritance hierarchy of schema.org Types and you get 
such oddities as fax numbers for volcanoes.

My own 2p-worth is that the defining feature of a schema.org/Event is 
that has a time and a location (and that the place can be abstract, like 
the Internet for webinars).

I think a big change like moving the commercial properties out of Event 
into a subtype that sits alongside Historical Event would break too much 
of the existing data. Consequently, I think a type for Historical Events 
(i.e. events of historical significance, used as reference points in for 
other events, not just any old past event) would probably sit in 
schema.org as a subtype of Event, and inherit all those 'commercial' 
properties from Event. FWIW, I think WW2 would be a fine as an example 
of such an event.

Also, I think there may be a case for something like a Named Period 
type. The Victorian Age, Paleocene Epoch would be examples. And yes, 
"WW2 era" could be a named period (if post-war and pre-war are, you kind 
of need something for the bit in between).

I am not sure whether you would need both Historical Event and Named 
Period, but I think they might facilitate slightly different types of 
statement (something and Historical Event X were contemporary; something 
was a consequence of Historical Event Y, something happened during the 
Named Period Z [but wasn't part of it in an event/sub-event way]).


As for extending schema.org, I've run a couple of W3C community groups. 
I would suggest first make sure that schema.org is the best vocabulary 
for this type of information, e.g. by thinking about use cases that fall 
within the scope of its mission. This thread could be the start of this. 
Then raise an issue on the schema.org github issue tracker if you think 
there is anything that is unaddressed. Setting up a W3C community group 
is straightforward and worth doing if you have complex set of use cases 
and a need to build some sort of community consensus around how to 
address them. Then you just need to recruit participants and steer the 
discussions around a coherent resolution of meeting your use cases--that 
can be more of a challenge.

Richard Wallis has written & presented a lot about extending schema, 
perhaps most usefully in this context would be his presentation about 
extend schema.org for bibliographic use:

  * Schema.org: Part 1 - Fit For a Bibliographic Purpose
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiijJj1v1bQ
  * Schema.org: Part 2 - Extending Potential and Possibilities
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKHw3UsD3r8

(He has also written a 3-part series of blog posts on the technical side 
https://dataliberate.com/2016/02/10/evolving-schema-org-in-practice-pt1-the-bits-and-pieces/ 
)

Hope this helps, Phil

On 31/05/18 21:07, Muri, Allison wrote:
> I think, respectfully, Thad, that you might not be understanding what 
> is needed. I would not really have a strong desire to use sameAs, 
> myself. This isn’t about “too much work,” really. What I am trying to 
> do, and I might be inferring correctly that Roger is, too, is to have 
> a simple schema.org <http://schema.org> markup that addresses events 
> other than commercial events. That would be either to have Event as a 
> category under which commercial events and historical events are 
> subcategories, or have Occurence or some such category.
>
> I am curious about Peter Patel-Schneider’s concern “about stretching 
> schema.org/Event <http://schema.org/Event> to cover … things like WWII 
> whose location is certainly not ‘certain’, or even
> anything that is not the kind of event that has performers and 
> attendees.” Why is that?
>
> I see, when I read about the Community Group and Steering Group 
> (http://schema.org/docs/about.html#cgsg), that “other W3C Community 
> Groups exist that are focussed partially or entirely on schema.org 
> improvements, e.g. health and medicine 
> <https://www.w3.org/community/schemed/>, sports 
> <https://www.w3.org/community/sport-schema/>,archives 
> <https://www.w3.org/community/architypes/>, libraries and bibliography 
> <https://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/>, autos 
> <https://www.w3.org/community/gao/>…”
>
> I wonder if there is someone on this list who is knowledgeable about 
> these other groups and could provide some information about what one 
> might do if one wanted to improve on markup for, say, history and 
> culture?
>
> - Allison
>
>
>
> On May 31, 2018, at 1:33 PM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Roger,
>>
>> Depends on what you are trying to do.
>>
>> I taking a stance that most of the time there's no need to tell a 
>> machine that something is historical if you can reconcile the entity 
>> before hand and provide data about that.
>>
>> Most machines will know and understand (if they are decently built 
>> and programmed) to know that "Battle of Gettysburg" is a historical 
>> event.
>> There's no need to tell most machines that...
>>
>> HistoricalEvent: Battle of Gettysburg
>>
>> if you could possibly reconcile your entities (your welcome to use my 
>> community's latest OpenRefine against Wikidata for that)
>> and instead of providing Strings...provide Things...
>>
>> HistoricalEvent: "Battle of Gettysburg
>> sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q33132
>>
>> Machines can easily find out lots of information by parsing Wikipedia 
>> itself like Google does, if you provide a sameAs url, or perhaps even 
>> better a Wikidata or DBPedia url.
>>
>> Giving us a better example of what you are trying to do would be most 
>> appreciated by all.
>>
>> My hunch is that you don't so much care about "Battle of Gettysburg" 
>> but relations around it ? What are those relations that you trying to 
>> establish ?  That it was partOf: American Civil War ?
>> What else ?
>>
>> Help us and we can help you,
>> -Thad
>>
>
> ....................................................
> Allison Muri
> Department of English
>
> Arts 418
> University of Saskatchewan
> Saskatoon, SK, Canada
> ph: 306.966.5503
>

-- 

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