Re: Historical events

Many, many thanks to those who have contributed to this interesting discussion. I am working on examples for two types: first, HistoricalEvent as a subtype of Event. The more I work through this as a possibility the more I wonder how usable it would be.  The second is Occurrent as a new type. This would have certain advantages and disadvantages, just as HistoricalEvent as would described above.

I will add examples tomorrow and then hopefully generate a discussion about the value and applicability of http://schema.org/Event/HistoricalEvent as subclass of Event versus something ttp://schema.org/Event/Occurrent to distinguish between an event as is now used for mostly future events, and the following for anthying that is an occurrencw the past.

More to come tomorrow.

- Alliaon


On Jun 4, 2018, at 5:11 AM, Phil Barker <phil.barker@pjjk.co.uk<mailto:phil.barker@pjjk.co.uk>> wrote:


On 03/06/18 00:07, Muri, Allison wrote:
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.

You're welcome.

This discussion has already lead to a suggested improvement in schema.org<http://schema.org>, so there is clearly some overlap between your interests and its scope. I like Richard's parallel to TouristAttraction.

I think there are also issues around Periods, Events and historical reference points that could be unpicked.

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)


This is a good use case. This probably isn't the right forum to go into details of addressing it, but by way of illustrating a point ... [I think you mentioned microdata at one point]

Nor with more heavy strokes could
  <span itemprop="mentions" itemscope
        itemtype="Event"
        name="1669 eruption of Mount Etna">
     Ætna groan
     <link itemprop="sameas" href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2411998"<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2411998>>
     <meta itemprop="location" content="Mount Etna">
     <meta itemprop="startDate" content="1669-03-08">
  <span>,


When Vulcan forg’d the Arms for Thetis’ Son

Follow the sameas URL and you will see that I cheated, but adding the relevant eruption would be possible, and what I did link to illustrates how machine readable information can be provided beyond the schema.org<http://schema.org> markup. I have been minimal in my description of the event in the inline schema.org<http://schema.org> markup, there could be a lot more there if required/useful.

Phil

--

Phil Barker<http://people.pjjk.net/phil>. http://people.pjjk.net/phil
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Allison Muri
Department of English

Arts 418
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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