Re: Comment versus UserComments

On 22 February 2012 21:27, Daniel Dulitz <daniel@google.com> wrote:
> I just wanted to follow up on this. I like the ideas mentioned here...
> seeing no further debate can we close on a new Comment type? :-)

I've added a row to the proposals table for this, and a Wiki page -
http://www.w3.org/wiki/Comment  in
http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals

The core proposal of adding a new type seems to have consensus, and we
should do it. I was just adding some more details but I'm finding the
wiki suddenly horribly slow the last half hour. It seems fine right
now; (maybe some spam-bot attack?).

I'll paste the wiki text below here in case others have the same
experience. If we can wrap up how deep we want to go in this round
(eg. supporting properties), it would be great to turn this into an
update proposal for the site. Adding 'Comment' seems clear progress;
but then how much more do we do in one step? commentBody property?
Plain text, or (if Microdata allows) markup somehow?

cheers,

Dan



This is a proposal for schema.org vocabulary, as discussed in the
[[WebSchemas]] group.

== Background ==

We have an issue tracking
[https://www.w3.org/2011/webschema/track/issues/12 problems with
UserComments], specifically that ""Comment is under UserInteractions
not CreativeWork; the former focus on aggregation"."

* Schema.org has a [http://schema.org/UserComments UserComments]
class, which defines properties commentText, commentTime, creator,
discusses ('Specifies the CreativeWork associated with the
UserComment.'), replyToUrl
* It's a [http://schema.org/UserInteraction UserInteraction], which is
a kind of event. Many have asked for a simple 'Comment' class that
describes the result of that event.
* This topic is somewhat complicated since other UserInteraction
subclasses are aggregates.

== Core Proposal ==

* Add a 'Comment' type, a subclass (e.g. like
[http://schema.org/Review Review]) of [http://schema.org/CreativeWork
CreativeWork].
* Clarify that the existing [http://schema.org/UserComments
UserComments] class represents the [http://schema.org/UserInteraction
UserInteraction] event that creates it.
* TODO: what properties do we want, if any; or indicate re-use of
'author', 'dateCreated', 'name' (for dc:title),
* (Stephane), "A comment body property should be created for the
Comment type (I guess it would be called commentBody following the
same convention as articleBody for the type Article)." (how do we
handle markup?)

== Issues ==

* Do we have a property linking a UserComments instance (ie. some
UserInteraction) to its resulting Comment?
* Do we have any comment-specific properties, or CreativeWork gives us
all we need.
* Address here also other confusions around the UserComments class,
such as that its siblings are aggregates and the example goofy?
* Recursion; how useful is 'discusses' for linking comments in a
thread, since a Comment is a legitimate CreativeWork now?
* Examples [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Jan/0056.html
from Drupal/SIOC] for potential vocabulary around Comment.

== Discussion ==

This came up [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/schemaorg-discussion/N7u4Z8356Ao/JIiFO0WWNF4J
previously], but most recent discussion:

* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Jan/0037.html
Comment versus UserComments], from Daniel Dullis:
** "I wanted to raise an issue about how to represent comments (e.g.
on blog posts).
** There are many subtypes of CreativeWork, but Comment is not one of
them. Perhaps it should be?
** Instead, it seems like comments are to be represented by
UserComments, which is a subtype of UserInteractions. But apart from
UserComments those types appear to be for aggregates, not for an
individual comment/tweet/like/etc. The type names are plural and don't
really fit for non-aggregates.
** I think the aggregate types are useful, but for each aggregate type
I'd like to have a clearly defined type for the individual thing.
What's the right way to achieve that?"
* Stéphane Corlosquet
** I agree that Comment would be a relevant type to be added to
schema.org. There was a similar discussion on the previous mailing
list where this topic was discussed, in particular the confusion
around markup of the aggregates. I'm pasting some of the conversation
below. See also the whole http://schema.org/UserInteraction
inconsistency problems thread.
** Note that since its launch in January 2011, Drupal 7 exposes each
individual comment and the aggregate number of comments in RDFa using
the SIOC vocabulary, so I'd love to see a schema.org equivalent for
both individual comments and the aggregate number of comments for a
given (blog) post.
* Dan Brickley
** mentioned (but won't advocate for, and nobody supported) an
alternate design: "Even though we don't assert that Comment is
subclass of CreativeWork, we also don't anywhere assert that no
comments are CreativeWorks. It might be there are some idioms where
treating some comments as creative works in this way is useful.
* Adrian Giurca
** I believe that potential http://schema.org/Comment shoud encode the
creative work by someone while http://schema.org/UserComments encodes
the action event of doing a comment.
** In fact, the property discusses:CreativeWork of UserComments looks
to confirm this view: An UserComments is an action event of an user
that post a Comment (as Creative Work) referred by "discusses".
** Therefore I would say that introducing http://schema.org/Comment is
a straight solution. In addition "discusses" may refer
http://schema.org/Comment

... indicates a general consensus towards the design documented here:
a new class. How much can we agree about what to add alongside it?
properties?


== Example sites==

These [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Jan/0047.html
example sites] show the kind of markup we hope will adopt this
vocabulary.

* http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32069983&postID=7424272840613555167
* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/18/keystone-pipeline-obama-administration_n_1213136.html[at
the bottom]
* http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/f-b-i-makes-insider-trading-arrests/[inside
the comment block inserted by Javascript]
* http://sportsnation.espn.go.com/fans/mooseisbeast3599/
* http://www.youtube.com/user/4thawt/feed



[[Category:WebSchemas]]
[[Category:WebSchemaProposals]]

Received on Wednesday, 29 February 2012 22:10:02 UTC