Re: Online events

I've encountered the same issues before while trying to markup live
webcasts Jeremy.

In general, I think the Event class and its more specific types were
initially modeled with things like concerts in mind, as evidenced by the
property "performer" and the paucity of properties for an Event.

I think Event could be made more useful without requiring the creation of
more properties by including many properties already used by CreativeWork;
these come to mind:

- associatedMedia (which would handle your webinar URI, Jeremy)
- audience
- audio
- comments
- interactionCount (UserInteraction is currently listed as "a more specific
type" of Event, which baffles me)
- review
- video

Since events like conferences or webinars are almost always conducted under
the auspices of an organization, some equivalent to these CreativeWork
properties would be useful:

- accountablePerson
- sourceOrganization

sourceOrganization might work in its own right, but as the description says
this is "The Organization on whose behalf the creator was working" this
seems a bit of a stretch.  I would suggest (in lieu of "publisher," which
also doesn't quite fit):

- accountableOrganization
(along *with* accountablePerson)

Finally, without wishing to propagate more types for Event, I think
Jeremy's thought about something like "VirtualEvent" would be very useful
indeed.  There are many, many things that occur at online a specific date
and time without a physical location:  webinars, Google Hangouts, webcasts,
virtual press conferences, and so on.

Here's a recent Guardian event where many of the properties discussed would
be useful (and to my point about accountableOrganization, note that while
the performer property is sufficient for the discussion's participants,
there's no way of saying in a properly structured way that the event was
hosted by the Guardian):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/responsible-mining-live-discussion

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 6:10 AM, jeremy french <jeremy@jeremyfrench.co.uk>wrote:

> I am trying to mark up a site with schema.org markup and have come across
> something that I believe is an omission.
>
> We have a number of events some are conferences or meetups, but a lot are
> webinars, the latter case causes two potential problems.
>
> 1: is that the location field is blank
> 2: is that there isn't a clear way to mark the URI for the webinar.
>
> It would seem to me that a URI could be used for the location. Perhaps
> with a specific event class VirtualEvent  to indicate that the location is
> not physical. Otherwise as I understand it the URI in location could
> resolve to something which describes a location, which could be confusing.
>
> Does this seem reasonable. Is there a better suggestion for marking up non
> spacial events?
>
> Regards
>  Jeremy
>
>
>