Re: Vocabularies for Technical Publishing

Great initiative, and I'm keenly interested in its development.

I have a couple of questions.

1. Can you put multiple product versions inside the same declaration? The same procedure might be valid for several different iterations of a product (and not valid for other specific iterations, obviously).

So, for example:

<div itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
      <p>
        <strong>Applies to:</strong>
        <span itemprop="name">Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2</span>
        <span itemprop="name">Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R3</span>
        <span itemprop="name">Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R4</span>
      </p>
      <meta itemprop="model" content="2008 R2"/>
      <meta itemprop="model" content="2008 R3"/>
      <meta itemprop="model" content="2008 R4"/>
      <meta itemprop="currentModel" content="2012"/>
</div>


2. Is it possible to specify the currentModel as a URI reference? So then you only have to update it in one place and voila, all your htmlz are updated - without having to republish everything or implement dynamic injection.

It seems like the other metadata is data about the page or entities described on or involved in production of the page; but the currentModel item is metadata about another entity - albeit related - which doesn't necessarily exist when the page is produced, /and/ changes over time. 

- Josh
     


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

Received on Sunday, 24 June 2012 20:24:06 UTC