Re: Historical events

Thad,

 The Event class’ description is “an event happening at a certain time and location, such as a concert, lecture or festival.”  Its properties—composer, performer, organizer, audience, doorTime, workPerformed, review etc.—clearly adhere to this narrow definition.  You’re suggesting that we shoehorn World War II battles and the Bronze Age into this schema, and quell any uneasiness thus induced by referencing an external vocabulary.  I will admit that this is possible; to my mind, it is undesirable.  Were the Event type truly a “general type” capable of serving as the superclass for these two different semantic elements, I’d feel differently.

To use an analogy, it’s as if  schema.org provided Funeral, but not Ceremony, and you told me “just use Funeral to represent Wedding, and reference  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q49836 as the additionalType.” 

I accept the premise that this is not a universal ontology.  But what classes there are, ought to retain their semantics.  The Bronze Age is not a-kind-of concert, lecture or festival.  I can’t see how your approach would result in truly machine-readable content.

respectfully,

Roger


> On May 29, 2018, at 2:13 PM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Allison and Roger... see examples below.  Yes, you can still use Event.  When you don't have a startDate or endDate, then just leave them excluded.  The use of additionalType and referencing other ontologies or Wikidata is quite useful and a generally accepted best practice when you need to easily subtype things that Schema.org has only general types available. 
> 
> {
>   "@context": "http://schema.org <http://schema.org/>",
>   "@type": "Event",
>   "sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q327052 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q327052>",
>   "additionalType": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15815670 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15815670>",
>   "name": "Battle of Aachen",
>   "startDate": "2 October 1944",
>   "description": "major conflict during World War II",
>   "endDate": "21 October 1944"
> }
> 
> {
>   "@context": "http://schema.org <http://schema.org/>",
>   "@type": "Event",
>   "sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11761 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11761>",
>   "additionalType": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15401699 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15401699>",
>   "name": "Bronze Age",
>   "description": "prehistoric period",
>   "about": "Historical Event"
> }
> 
> Any other questions ?
> -Thad
>