Re: Historical events

Hello again to the list, and thank you for this invitation, Dan. I have done my best to summarize suggestions for improvements that might be useful (and as practical as possible, without renaming types or changing hierarchies).

•      Event types: the current description of Event makes it seem as though the type is intended solely for commercial events held in venues that one can buy tickets for, or commercial transactions such as delivery events. Currently the type does not seem applicable for a historical event.
◦       All in all, it seems that historical event probably does not need a new type or sub-type: Schema.org<http://Schema.org> GitHub issue #1931<https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1931> addresses the problem in part, by proposing to redefine Event as: “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.”
◦       The Multi Type Entity (MTE) feature in Schema.org<http://Schema.org>, where any entity can be described of being of more than one type, is likely to be of use in marking up items of historical significance.
◦       One may want to describe a collection of battles as a super-event called WWII. One may also find it useful to label a time period WWII. For example, if describing someone as being born in 1941, it is more useful to describe that era as a time period.
◦       Useful sub-types for Event might include: ArmedConflict, CosmologicalEvent, DiseaseOutbreak, Election, Enthronement, Invention, Investiture, GeologicalEvent, NaturalEvent, PersonalEvent, PoliticalEvent (with the caveat that too many sub-types is not particularly desirable).
•      historicalEntity (or some other term meaning historicalThing): could be useful as a property (or as a type, or both) for sites focusing on history, culture, literature, and so on, to identify items, buildings, people, events, etc., as “relating to history as a subject of study, education, or interest.”
◦       A type such as TouristAttraction that can be added with any other type when describing any thing could be useful.
•      Period or NamedPeriod type: it is important to distinguish between events and ages or eras: WWII is an event, but the Bronze Age or the 1960s are timeframes when events happened rather than the events themselves; importantly, there is currently no way to describe a period in time or history.
◦       One proposed description for such a type: “A length of time in history characterized by some prevalent or distinguishing condition, circumstance, phenomenon, influence, etc., or by the rule of a particular government, dynasty, etc.; an age, era.”).
◦       Properties such as the following could be appropriate for such a type:

▪       startDate

▪       endDate

▪       approximateStartDate (the approximate start date and time of the item (in ISO 8601 extensions date format<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>

▪       approximateEndDate (the approximate end date and time of the item (in ISO 8601 extensions date format<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>)

▪       name
▪       correlationEvent
◦       Period or NamedPeriod could be a subtype of either Thing or of Intangible.
•      Time: there were some suggestions here but this conversation did not carry on far enough for me to provide much more nuance:

o   owl-time ontology from w3c uses terminology from Allen in a formalisation of relationships between time-intervals. Terms like interval, position, duration, instant are suggested.




On Jun 20, 2018, at 2:00 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com<mailto:danbri@google.com>> wrote:

Allison,

We have now got to around 100 messages on this topic in less than a month. Do you feel in a position to attempt a synthesis of the discussions in a proposal for improving Schema.org<http://Schema.org> here? I'd encourage something simple as a first step unless some data consumer is stepping forward to build something with this data. At this stage an e-mailed summary of proposed changes would be a good next step, it doesn't have to be the machine readable schemas...

cheers,

Dan

On Fri, 25 May 2018, 18:10 Muri, Allison, <allison.muri@usask.ca<mailto:allison.muri@usask.ca>> wrote:
Hello,

I’ve been looking around for some way to markup historical events, for example “the Trojan War.” It seems there were initiatives around 2012 or so (http://historical-data.org<http://historical-data.org/>; http://historical-data-schema.blogspot.ca/) that seem to have stalled. I’m new to this group, so apologies if I’m asking something that is repetitive.

All the best,
Allison
....................................................
Professor 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