Re: Historical events

To Roger's point, I think we should distinguish between events and ages or
eras. I think it is fine to call WWII an "event", but the Bronze Age or the
1960s are more timeframes when events happened rather than the events
themselves.

- Vicki

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 2:04 PM Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Roger !
>
> Good points.  However...
>
> It is all up to the consuming applications to extract value from any
> structured data you provide.  Google, Bing, MyApplications, etc.
>
> 99% of the applications will understand what you mean when you say
>
>     Event : Bronze Age
>
> If a machine or application has difficulty understanding the Semantic
> meaning of that statement ?  Then you can supply just a small handful of
> additional structure to tell that machine or application what you really
> mean.
>
>     Event : Bronze Age
>     sameAs : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11761
>
> Your looking at the Event class description with the context of "...such
> as..."  DON'T, we provide merely examples.  It is best to concern yourself
> with only the leading description...
> "an event happening at a certain time and location"
>
> And where we already have an understanding that Location is ... OPTIONAL :)
>
> In fact, in all things Schema.org and Semantic Web, the only must-have
> property rule is that of "name".  Everything else is bonus structured data.
> "Some structure is better than no structure at all"
>
> Its very likely in the next release that we update the description to
> simply be ... (which in my opinion we should have done long ago)
>
> "an event happening at a certain time, this could include a location when
> necessary. Examples, concert, lecture, festival, Bronze Age"
>
> -Thad
>
> On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 12:25 PM Roger Rohrbach <roger@ecstatic.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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",
>>   "@type": "Event",
>>   "sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q327052",
>>   "additionalType": "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",
>>   "@type": "Event",
>>   "sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11761",
>>   "additionalType": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15401699",
>>   "name": "Bronze Age",
>>   "description": "prehistoric period",
>>   "about": "Historical Event"
>> }
>>
>> Any other questions ?
>> -Thad
>>
>>
>>