Re: Historical events

Allison,

The repercussions are that it is a never ending list of Event subtypes.  A
maintenance nightmare where the burden is put on Me, Schema.org
stakeholders, Wikidata, Communities, Ontology Departments, etc. (but some
say that's fine, because as schema providers, its our job to do the hard
work, so that it is easier for consumers).  But honestly, it is actually
providing LESS structured information, rather than MORE, until someone on
our end or a volunteer connects all the little dots to make the magic of
Semantic Understanding happen behind the scenes.

You still have to classify, unless Schema.org decides to maintain ontology
mappings and lots of rich understanding of Types stored in an ever
expanding RDF file (they don't want to, and that makes sense, so instead
volunteers like me connect the dots in areas outside of Schema.org RDF file)

These Types you listed are easy for you and I to understand, like an Event
about Natural Things.  A computer won't understand it verbatim, you have to
give more info, or train it to recognize:

*Scenario 1 - Easy For You*
NaturalEvent:

(computer: wait, what kind of event specifically ? What does Natural mean?
Is that the same as Nature ? wait, what Nature are we talking about again ?
who owns Nature ? what time is it again :-) ?)
<here is where the burden of making sense of it for you and search tools,
is put on volunteers and paid publishers and ontologists>

Oh yeah, and that's just for 1 Event subtype your asking for.

Are you willing to volunteer to maintain lots of metadata for all those
Event subtypes ?  If you are, GREAT !  I have 242 extra tasks I can give
you right now. (not counting Naval Ship Classes de-tangling because someone
offlist asked us to)

*versus*


*Scenario 2 - Easy for Us (Schema.org and volunteers around the world, like
me)*

Event:
  about: {
    name: Nature
    sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7860
    ,
    name: Disaster
    sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3839081
    }

  additionalType: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8065
  diambiguatingDescription: A natural disaster event specifically, i.e. a
Disaster created by natural phenomenen

I am open to either scenario, but Scenario 1 comes with a hell of a lot of
maintenance work for many folks and volunteers all around the world.  We'd
be glad to make you one of those :-)

-Thad

On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 8:39 PM Muri, Allison <allison.muri@usask.ca> wrote:

> This all makes sense to me. Thank you, Richard and Phil.
>
> So let’s say that historical event could become a type of Event. What
> would be the repercussions of adding to this list of Types for Event:
>
> More specific Types
> • BusinessEvent
> • ChildrensEvent
> • ComedyEvent
> • CourseInstance
> • DanceEvent
> • DeliveryEvent
> • EducationEvent
> • ExhibitionEvent
> • Festival
> • FoodEvent
> • LiteraryEvent
> • MusicEvent
> • PublicationEvent
> • SaleEvent
> • ScreeningEvent
> • SocialEvent
> • SportsEvent
> • TheaterEvent
> • VisualArtsEvent
>
>
> … such Types as:
>
> • HistoricalEvent
> • HistoricalPeriod
> • InventionEvent
> • MilitaryConflictEvent
> • NaturalEvent
> • DiseaseEvent or DiseaseOutbreakEvent
>
> … etc.?
>
> After all this very interesting conversation, I must say I am a bit
> perplexed as to why anyone would object to providing more specific markup
> concerning historical events, when such types as LiteraryEvent or FoodEvent
> seem quite uncontroversial.
>
>