Re: Historical events

Hello, to all who have been commenting on this question. I have been following with great interest whenever I can.

I have tried two different approaches for what I originally called historical events. I know I’ve got some things not quite right, but the links below offer preliminary sketches with just a couple examples. I’m leaning toward a new class, Occurrent, as the best solution, because it wouldn’t interfere with the current use of, and assumptions about, Event.

To reiterate, I am not thinking that HistoricalEvent is the same as merely a past event. What I’m thinking about is something that would be of significant value to webmasters whose sites focus on history, cultural history, natural history, literary history, literature, diaries (e.g. the Diary of Anne Frank), news, political commentary, etc.


https://sdo-occurrent.appspot.com separates Event and Occurrence into their own classes, as follows:

Event: A planned or scheduled public, social, sporting, or commercial event happening at a certain time and location physical or virtual, such as a concert, lecture, meeting, or festival. Ticketing information may be added via the [[offers]] property. Repeated events may be structured as separate Event objects.

Occurrent: A thing that occurs, happens, or takes place; an incident, especially one of significance.

More specific types for Occurrent would include such things as:

• ArmedConflict
• DiseaseOutbreak
• Election
• Enthronement
• HistoricalEvent
• Invention
• Investiture
• NaturalEvent
• PersonalEvent
• PoliticalEvent

I have examples here for Occurrent and HistoricalEvent.

https://sdo-historicalevent.appspot.com includes HistoricalEvent as a subclass of Event.

Event: An event happening at a certain time past or future and location physical or virtual, such as a concert, lecture, meeting, festival, or historical event. Ticketing information may be added via the [[offers]] property. Repeated events may be structured as separate Event objects.

Here there would be a somewhat odd jumbled list of more specific types (the list of Properties from Event, which I haven’t started adding, would be confusingly long and wide ranging in this scenario):

• ArmedConflict
• BusinessEvent
• ChildrensEvent
• ComedyEvent
• CourseInstance
• DanceEvent
• DeliveryEvent
• DiseaseOutbreak
• EducationEvent
• Election
• Enthronement
• ExhibitionEvent
• Festival
• FoodEvent
• HistoricalEvent
• Invention
• Investiture
• LiteraryEvent
• MusicEvent
• NaturalEvent
• PersonalEvent
• PoliticalEvent
• PublicationEvent
• SaleEvent
• ScreeningEvent
• SocialEvent
• SportsEvent
• TheaterEvent
• VisualArtsEvent

I have the example here for HistoricalEvent.

One last comment, I was looking at http://schema.org/Corporation for examples and thought it strange that the only example is for http://schema.org/Store. Maybe that’s purposeful, but I was wondering if there is an ommission there?


Thoughts? Advice?

- Allison



On Jun 12, 2018, at 1:55 AM, Martin Hepp <mfhepp@gmail.com<mailto:mfhepp@gmail.com>> wrote:

I think that it is problematic to have a subtype "HistoricEvent", because it will mean that the type for a object will depend on the temporal context. E.g., a day after a conference is over, it wil become a HistoricEvent.

My feeling is that a lot of confusion stems from the fact that schema.org<http://schema.org> tries to avoid subclasses as long as they do not change the processing of respective entities by search engines. For instance, we do not need a subtype of places as long as all places are rendered the same way by Google et al.

As a consequence, we attach properties that make sense only for some instances directly to the more abstract classes.

This sounds unintuitive if you come from a knowledge engineering context, but it is actually so by design. A type in schema.org<http://schema.org> serves as a hookpoint for triggering / grouping computational operations over the data. If you have no algorithmic steps that require a certain distinction, then we do not have respective specializations of a type.

Best

Martin


-----------------------------------
martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org<mailto:mhepp@computer.org>          @mfhepp




On 12 Jun 2018, at 09:08, Muri, Allison <allison.muri@usask.ca<mailto:allison.muri@usask.ca>> wrote:

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"

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

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



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

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