Re: Historical events

Hi Thad,

It really all depends what the Type is intended to be.

significant as a noun means “a thing which expresses or conveys meaning; a sign, a symbol, an indication.” I think what people seem to be intending is the adjective “sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy; consequential, influential.”

entity means “a thing with distinct and independent existence” or “something that has a real existence; an ens n., as distinguished from a mere function, attribute, relation, etc.” [an ens is “something which has existence; a ‘being’, entity, as opposed to an attribute, quality, etc.”].

HistoricalSignificant, to me, would suggest that either:

a. this thing is really quite important to history (a war but not a housekeeper’s commonplace book)—so the application of this would be somewhat narrowly defined; or

b. this thing has been deemed by someone to be important enough to mark up as historically significant. That’s okay, but as I said before, simply marking it up as historical-something-or-other means someone has decided it’s significant (so why put the word significant in at all?) To me, that would be like having to say SignificantEvent instead of just Event.

My thinking was that HistoricalEntity (or some other type meaning HistoricalThing) would be readily understood to be broadly applicable.

I realize of course that I am being somewhat presumptuous, strolling in here and debating this with people who have spent years working on schema.org<http://schema.org>! (I have been using it ever since it first appeared, so I guess that is my main claim to authority—for what it’s worth!). It just seems that:

a. a Thing should be a noun (whereas I suppose a property could be something like historicallySignificant); and

b. a Type should be as broadly useful as possible

Cheers,
Allison

On Jun 18, 2018, at 11:42 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com<mailto:thadguidry@gmail.com>> wrote:

Allison,

Does it help to think this way ?

A Significant - some Thing of importance to someone or some group.
A Significant Other - some Person of importance to another Person.

HistoricalSignificant - some Thing that has historical importance to someone or some group.

-Thad


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

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