Question on proposed sports vocab extensions for schema.org

Hi
I have been working recently at the Press Association with the Sport
ontology, modelling the Olympics , Football and Horse Racing. I have
been following the proposed sports vocabulary extensions for
Schema.org, and have a question around these constructs :

Thing > Person > SportsAthlete
Thing > Person > SportsAthlete/Baseball
Thing > Person > SportsAthlete/Football

I guess I am not 100% comfortable with the idea of sub-classing a
Person as an Athlete - I dont really see an Athlete as a more
specialised form of a Person, but rather than a Role or Vocation that
a Person takes in life.

Just because we tend to think of many roles/vocations as being people
oriented (Doctor, Engineer), in many cases they are not. For example
in this case ESPN list "Secreteriat" , a race horse, in their top 50
Atheletes of the century (number 36)  :

http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/athletes.html

Thus, if ESPN marked up their list against this vocabulary, we would
be inferring that Secreteriat is a Person.

So I am keen to understand the reasoning behind this approach , or of
this could possibly be changed such that Roles (temporal) /or
Vocations (possibly not temporal)  are separate Things that are
applied via some other relationship to a Person (or a Horse or a Robot
for that matter)


kind regards,
Paul Wilton

Received on Monday, 5 March 2012 14:59:29 UTC