Re: Historical events

I think, as is often in these threads, we are discussing several things
concepts and views at the same time.

For a moment I would like to pick out some specific considerations around
the current Event type.  These I believe are still relevant regardless of
if it suddenly became a super type for lots of new types or not.

At the beginning of this conversation, some identified that the current
description of associated with the Event type is not ideal for indicating
its broad use, especially for events in the distant past (considered
historically significant or not).  As a consequence of this, I raised a
GitHub issue <https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1931> proposing
a tweak to the description:

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. Repeated events may be structured as separate Event objects. Where
applicable ticketing information may be added via the offers property.


Also an associated extra example of the use for such an event is included
in the issue.

I also have some sympathy with Vicki’s suggestions of
‘approximateStartDate’ and ‘approximateEndDate’
to handle things that occurred at some vague-ish period in the past.

However the challenge I don’t think they handle sufficiently is identifying
that something happened in a period with a name (Jurassic Period, Middle
Ages, 10th Century, etc.). Yes, you could supply the start/end dates for
those periods but it would require a detailed understanding of some of
those periods (and the debates about when they actually began and ended),
to understand the larger period meanings.

In simple terms I think Event could benefit from a property with a name
that means ‘when’ - the period in which the even took place.  Unfortunately
I believe a property named ‘when’ would be widely misunderstood
and misused, so I suggest the fairly ugly *periodEventOccured* which could
take ether a Text or URL (perhaps of a Wikidata description of
the period).  Maybe there is potential also for an Event Subtype of *Period*
that could also be used here, but maybe that is one step too far until we
see how things are used in the wild.

I am suggesting that, as what could be considered as a side branch of this
thread, some of us allocate a little attention to that issue and get it in
a state to update the vocabulary in the short term.  This whilst
this excellent debate continues about the larger picture.

I do have further thoughts on those wider issues, but will share them
separately to keep focus on these specific points.

~Richard.





Richard Wallis
Founder, Data Liberate
http://dataliberate.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
Twitter: @rjw

On 19 June 2018 at 18:41, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:

> Anthony,
>
> We do, as a community, agree on the Schema.org Vocabulary Terms and debate
> them at length sometimes on mailing list and Github issues, and even put
> them into https://pending.schema.org (for early review).
>
> Wikidata stores more than just instance data, they are also a controlled
> vocabulary where the control is in the hands of the community as well.
>
>    - Wikidata:Property proposal
>    <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Property_proposal>,
>    to discuss new properties before they are created - Wikidata:Properties
>    for deletion
>    <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Properties_for_deletion>
>    to nominate properties for deletion.
>
> -Thad
>
>>