Re: Online events

I think adding the properties you suggest may do away with the need for a new event type. 

Some events are both physical and have online components. A live stream of a conference for example. So the properties would be useful in all cases.

An event with an associatedMedia, or other media field but no location is implicitly an online event.

I think that is quite a neat solution.

----- Reply message -----
From: "Aaron Bradley" <aaranged@gmail.com>
To: "jeremy french" <jeremy@jeremyfrench.co.uk>
Cc: "Public Vocabs" <public-vocabs@w3.org>
Subject: Online events
Date: Tue, Dec 18, 2012 22:52
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