Re: Historical events

Hi, all:

 I’ve just joined the Community Group because I’ve started consulting for the American Battlefield Trust (https://www.battlefields.org <https://www.battlefields.org/>) and anticipate wanting the same thing Allison is looking for, to mark up Civil War battles, etc., so I thought I’d join the chorus.

While a grand model of temporality like OWL-Time may be useful to the semantic Web folks, my impression is that schema.org <http://schema.org/> is supposed to be more pragmatic.  In this case, too pragmatic; the notion of Event supported here is the one defined by the OED as “A planned or scheduled (public or social) occasion,” because search engines want to highlight these (often commercial and hence monetized via advertising) events.  Events in the OED sense of “something that happens or takes place, esp. something significant or noteworthy; an incident, an occurrence” are not modeled.  Extending the present Event schema to encompass this meaning is not a solution.  Ideally, Event should be made more abstract and the current schema should become a subclass (e.g., ScheduledEvent).

I’m guessing there’s massive inertia militating against that.  So, as a newcomer, I’d like to ask if it’s even something worth discussing here.  More broadly: what is ontological scope of the schema.org <http://schema.org/> effort?  It appears that the creation and consumption of media, online publishing, travel, tourism, e-commerce and related activities in the here and now are well catered for, but the representation of knowledge, not so much.  Are requests like Allison’s considered out-of-band? 

As an aside, I was unaware of historical-data.org <http://historical-data.org/>; it looks like someone, rather than joining the present effort, decided to attempt to extend existing schema developed here to suit their needs (and mimic the schema.org <http://schema.org/> site while at it), giving up after nine months.  There’s nothing there I’d want to use; they extended CreativeWork to HistoricalRecord, and relied on the existing Event schema (insufficient, for the reasons outlined above) to capture the historical event of interest.

best regards,

Roger


> On May 29, 2018, at 6:16 AM, Muri, Allison <allison.muri@usask.ca> wrote:
> 
> Thank you Manolis! I guess the question might be put this way: how to mark an event that occurs in the past or doesn’t have a specific time associated with it as an “Event” using Schema.org <http://schema.org/> vocabulary. Does a historical event need a new/different type, like http://schema.org/LiteraryEvent <http://schema.org/LiteraryEvent> or http://schema.org/SportsEvent <http://schema.org/SportsEvent>. Is there any development in this direction?
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On May 29, 2018, at 6:49 AM, Manolis Koubarakis <koubarak@di.uoa.gr <mailto:koubarak@di.uoa.gr>> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Alison,
>> perhaps the closest to what you want is the
>> recent Time Ontology proposed in the context of a W3C/OGC
>> spatial data on the web working group. Please see
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/ <https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/>
>> 
>> Best
>> Manolis
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Thank you. I know about https://schema.org/Date <https://schema.org/Date>, which I use for actual
>>> dates. I was wondering specifically about events, and tried marking
>>> historical events as events but that generated errors in the validator
>>> because I didn’t have a time and location marked up. Event seems intended
>>> for commercial events held in venues that one can buy tickets for. It
>>> doesn’t seem to really fit for something that happened sometime in the
>>> late Bronze Age—or  the Plague in London 1665-1666. It would be nice to be
>>> able to specify that information because then I could select all
>>> historical events in any particular text.
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
>>> On May 29, 2018, at 5:09 AM, chaals is Charles McCathie Nevile
>>> <chaals@yandex.ru <mailto:chaals@yandex.ru><mailto:chaals@yandex.ru <mailto:chaals@yandex.ru>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> You can use https://schema.org/Date <https://schema.org/Date> for various properties that are dates,
>>> and currently it says it is "an ISO 8601 date". Which, given the proposed
>>> update to that standard, **might** mean you can use an uncertain year
>>> range. (I don't have a copy of the document, so I am going on the Library
>>> of Congress syntax which I think got modified...)
>>> 
>>> e.g. [-1400?~..-1200?~]/[-1400?~..-1200?~]
>>> 
>>> In HTML you could also use a time element to provide the named period "The
>>> Trojan War".
>>> 
>>> 
>>> It is a repeated question because the Web platform generally does not have
>>> a very useful answer :(
>>> 
>>> cheers
>>> 
>>> Chaals
>>> 
>>> 25.05.2018, 18:10, "Muri, Allison"
>>> <allison.muri@usask.ca <mailto:allison.muri@usask.ca><mailto:allison.muri@usask.ca <mailto:allison.muri@usask.ca>>>:
>>> 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.org<http://historical-data.org/>>;
>>> http://historical-data-schema.blogspot.ca/ <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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Chaals is Charles McCathie Nevile
>>> find more at http://yandex.com <http://yandex.com/>
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>