Re: MiniSKOS update: back to "Topic" (but thanks for trying out the ConceptCode idea)

Hi all,


>>
>> OK, it's certainly examples time. I think lurking beneath the lack of
>> strong consensus on a type name are different expectations about the
>> scope of this mechanism. I'll try to collect some examples but please
>> also can people share some brief examples in this thread?
>> ...
>> Dan
>
>
> One of the properties for which the proposed Topic might be the expected type is the targetUrl of http://schema.org/AlignmentObject (or maybe we should add a new property, e.g. target, but that's a different discussion). The AlignmentObject expresses the relationship between a learning resource (in schema.org currently a CreativeWork) and a node in an educational framework. It may be used to say the resource is suitable for teaching/learning/assessing a particular learning objective in a shared curriculum, or that it is suitable for a particular academic level or reading level. "Node" in an "educational framework" seems a reasonable match for topic, category or controlled code in a coding system, so I have had a look at some example educational frameworks to see how they might work with the proposed Topic type.


The naming of the class and property is really strange (AlignmentObject and targetUrl seem here to be used with a much more precise meaning, while their intuitive semantics is relatively general, and could have been used by other communities...) but I guess this is a relevant use of Topic anyway.


> because the people who maintain the frameworks don't seem to be have been thinking of machine-readable coding schemes (I have to say that the " Topic code (typically published at some url, eg. using W3C SKOS)" bit on the Topic page made me smile--Dan must have been in an optimistic mood when he wrote that :)


There are some cases around:
http://www.education.gov.uk/researchandstatistics/datasets/a00224315/a-z
http://vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au/
http://skos.um.es/unescothes/


Continuing to Dan's original question. I guess http://schema.org/about would be a great candidate for using Topic as range. But schema:about needs still to accept strings, for the simpler forms of description (the most common ones of course) and any kind of schema:Thing, because CreativeWorks can also be about persons, objects, etc. Can schema.org accommodate somewhere a sort of usage note on both Topic and about, saying that one can be perfectly used with the other, even though it might not be the most common case?

Cheers,

-- 
Antoine

Received on Friday, 6 December 2013 09:10:36 UTC