Re: Historical events

On Jun 2, 2018, at 8:32 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com<mailto:thadguidry@gmail.com>> wrote:

I still think the level of effort you put in to have concatenated Things or Concepts (Food + Event) into Schema.org<http://schema.org/> Types and then trying to have them accepted is not worth that effort if you are wanting to create buckets or high-level categories in the hopes that Google, Bing, Yahoo and others will have a richer understanding of differences between the strings "coronation of a monarch" and "volcanic eruption".  It is because they already know those differences, so those suggested types don't help much.

Well you might be right that this is not a worthwhile endeavour from your perspective, but I find it quite an interesting prospect!

Maybe this won’t generate much interest, but I have obtained my own fork of the Schema.org<http://Schema.org> GitHub repository and also have set up a Google App Engine project to be share it publicly. I take Phil Barker’s point that one should “first make sure that schema.org<http://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.” I really don’t know the answer to that. Hopefully I can generate more conversations about this in the future. Thank you, Phil, for the links to Richard Wallis’ blog posts and videos.

Regarding “they already know those differences,” I think search engines would not know that “Ætna groan” in the passage below refers to the 1669 eruption of Mount Etna, a “NaturalEvent” (as opposed to a satiric reference to a really firey, angry queen at her coronation) without markup:

Nor with more heavy strokes could Ætna groan,
When Vulcan forg’d the Arms for Thetis’ Son.

—Poems on Several Subjects, by Stephen Duck (1730)

… or that the “Pestilence first brought into Italy from Dalmatia” in the passage below is an outbreak of the Plague (in a metaphoric sense the words could also refer to a political event):

Perhaps some essential Symptoms had not yet appeared, or at least not been observed; particularly whether it resembled <span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/DiseaseOutbreak"><span itemprop="name">the Pestilence</span></span> first brought into Italy from Dalmatia, in those Eruptions or Abscesses that covered the Body like the Smallpox, and was the characteristic Mark of the Disease of that Time …

— An essay concerning pestilential contagion, by John Davis (1748)

In a text from 1748, where the “name” is not up to me, I would think marking “Pestilence” as a subcategory of HistoricalEvent such as DiseaseOutbreak would provide valuable information (SameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q42005 would also be useful, but that doesn’t tell me, within my own document, what kind of Thing Pestilence is).

Maybe I’m tilting at windmills, but will explore the possibilities.

Cheers,
- Allison


....................................................
Allison Muri
Department of English

Arts 418
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK, Canada
ph: 306.966.5503