Re: Historical events

Hello again (and a very big thank you) to everyone contributing to this fascinating dialogue,

I went away and thought some more about all the comments and advice and debate, and I understand the concerns/doubts raised by various people about a new type HistoricalEvent or Occurrent.

I think I now have a workable starting point from which to go away and look into setting up a W3C Community Group in order to see if there is a community of interest in using schema.org<http://schema.org> markup as follows to reflect certain kinds of historical significance and additional specific types under Event.

https://sdo-historical.appspot.com/HistoricalEntity as a new that could be used on its own, or with other types to indicate that it has historical significance—there are a few examples here (thanks, webfeet for suggesting something like HistoricalSignificance to apply more broadly, and to Richard, for explaining the Multi Type Entity (MTE) feature). This might potentially be useful for a wide range of websites, from tourism to museums to literature and history. The reason for “Historical” and not “Historic” is that historic suggests “great” or “very important” events, places, artifacts etc., while historical suggests that the thing is associated with the study or learning of, or interest in, history.

https://sdo-historical.appspot.com/Event with some more specific types (no examples yet). I’ve added period<https://sdo-historical.appspot.com/period> as a property to Event to see how this would work. It seems it is valuable as a property, but I will get advice on whether that is a good idea or not.

https://sdo-historical.appspot.com/Period as a new type.

Cheers,
Allison

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Allison Muri
Department of English

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