Re: Vocabularies for Technical Publishing

Hi Lin,

I share your excitement on the potential of these proposals.


*         aboutProduct and currentProduct warrants further discussion. You bring up a good point on simplifying the description, and we may be able to simplify the proposal even more by simply using 'about' to refer to the 'Product' item.



The scenario for aboutProduct and currentProduct:

It is very common for steps in technical documentation to vary between product versions, and multiple supported versions of a product often exists in a marketplace concurrently.
As a product matures the content for that product version accumulates links / popularity. This becomes a problem when a new product releases to the marketplace and customers search for information on implementing the new product.  Often times newer content is often difficult to find because it must compete with legacy content which overwhelmingly appears first in search results.

The purpose of aboutProduct and currentProduct is to help search engines disambiguate between product versions, and offer newer content for the product when appropriate.



With this in mind, instead of using aboutProduct and currentProduct , a more elegant solution may be to refer to the 'Product' item using the 'about' property that we inherit from CreativeWork.



Example:



Here 'about' describes the Product and version pertaining to the content; as well as, version of the most recent shipping product:



<div itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">

      <p>

        <strong>Applies to:</strong>

        <span itemprop="name">Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2</span>

      </p>

      <meta itemprop="model" content="2008 R2"/>

      <meta itemprop="currentModel" content="2012"/>

</div>



Here 'about' also informs where to get more information on the overall concept:



<span itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">

      <meta itemprop="name" content="Database management System"/>

      <meta itemprop="url" content="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbms"/>

</span>



Interested in the communities thoughts on this. I'll kick-off a separate thread to get input from the community on adding "currentModel" property to Product.



*         Re: External enumeration: I concur, that using the method described in the External Enumeration proposal could work as well. I expect that search engines would support both.

All the best,
Kenley