Accreditation

I think schema.org could do with an Accreditation class. This should
be an Intangible object, and property of at least Organisation,
Person, Product and Place.
The properties this class would need as a minimum are:

Accreditation name (text)
Accrediting body (an Organisation)
Level or Grade (text)

Some examples of things with accreditations:

Person: someone with a doctorate, a qualified podiatrist, physiotherapist, etc
Organisation: a company licensed to handle asbestos, mercury, nuclear
waste, etc.
Place: a Grade II* listed historic building, Area of Outstanding
Natural Beauty, UNESCO World Heritage Site, etc.
Product: consumer electronics device with an EnergyStar or EPEAT rating

This differs from the "Rating" class in that it is awarded to an
entity by a recognised, independent body, and is not an opinion (like
a movie review), but a qualified assertion that certain requirements
have been met. I considered suggesting that Accreditation be a
sub-class of Rating, and the grade property be inherited via
ratingValue, but felt that the Rating class was already firmly
established as containing an opinion, and also the minimum and maximum
values for an accreditation might be unknown, infinite, null etc so
having the defaults be 1 to 5 was a bad thing. Also, often Grade 1 is
better than Grade 2. This would mean that an accreditation that ranges
from Grade 1 to Grade 4 would have to have a ratingValue of "4" for a
Grade 1 award, and "1" for a Grade 4 award. This is likely to cause
confusion and authoring errors. So I propose no upper or lower bounds
be defined, and that the level or grade property simply be freeform
text. Furthermore, many accreditations would simply be a boolean value
with no grading.

A search engine could then be told, "list all AONBs within Yorkshire",
or "find me an NICEIC-approved electrician in Stevenage" and use this
class to generate results. Assertions by the accrediting body that
such-and-such an entity has this Accreditation should have much higher
weighting than an assertion by the recipient that they have any such
Accreditation. Such weightings can be applied by the search engine
themselves, after building the graph.


Lastly, Dan, can you add this to
http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals for me.

-- 
Nicholas.

Received on Thursday, 4 October 2012 12:19:41 UTC