Re: Historical events

Roger makes a good point.

I understand that for the Web in general, for applications such as Google, Bing, MyApplications, etc., minimal markup such as “name” is just fine. I’m working on something that ideally is more nuanced in terms of the type of information encoded.

Just as it is useful to know that something is a BusinessEvent and not a SportsEvent, it would be helpful to people working in disciplines such as History, Literature, Cultural Studies, etc., to know that something is a HistoricalEvent.

On the one hand, it would be possible to use HTML5 data-* attributes for markup where more information is needed:

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" data-event="history"><span itemprop="name">Trojan war</span></span>

But on the other hand that’s bulky and inefficient. I am working on scripts that select based on Schema class. So, for my own selfish purposes it would be preferable to do this:

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/HistoricalEvent"><span itemprop="name">Trojan war</span></span>

If I wanted to add Time or Place, I can always do so—but what I am really interested in being able to do is to select Historical Events—so I could differentiate between the Trojan War as above, and a play, as follows:

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/TheatreEvent"><span itemprop="name”><span itemprop="startDate" content=“1727-12-13">Double Falshood</span></span></span>

and a generic yearly event, as follows:

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event"><span itemprop="name”>Bartholomew Fair</span></span>




On May 30, 2018, at 11:58 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com<mailto:thadguidry@gmail.com>> wrote:

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<http://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<mailto: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<http://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

....................................................
Allison Muri
Department of English

Arts 418
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK, Canada
ph: 306.966.5503