Re: FictionalThing proposal added to Web Schemas wiki

Massively agreed - the thing itself (isFictional or not) is not nearly so
important as the context in which the thing appears. Any one data point
cannot be sufficiently described unto itself, only identified.

On 2/19/13 10:54 AM, "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

>On 19 February 2013 15:07, Mo McRoberts <Mo.McRoberts@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>> As I understand it, the BBC's internal archive classification scheme
>>wrestled with precisely this issue ‹ in the end it settled on 'people',
>>'fictional people' and 'religious entities', with some fairly clear
>>guidelines about what to do if there was doubt about which of latter two
>>somewhere should sit (and all three were considered mutually exclusive).
>>At least then the consumer of the data can deal with the information as
>>it sees fit.
>>
>> I'll readily admit it's by no means an easy thing to settle, however:
>>what about real people appearing 'as themselves' in a fictional work?
>>The person themselves is as real as you or I, but the events in which
>>they participate are fictional. I don't think we ever quite solved that
>>one in the archive classifications.
>
>Yes, let's not get into the business of deciding which Gods exist. Or
>people, for that matter?
>
>http://schema.org/Person 'A person (alive, dead, undead, or
>fictional).' ...tries to avoid the issue.
>
>I'm glad either way that there is a target proposal now to debate.
>
>I had a quick chat with Guha recently re FictionalX. His suggestion
>was that fictitiousness was not best expressed with special types, but
>with special properties.
>
>Another route is to just accept that some documents in the Web contain
>microdata/rdfa that is not strictly true of our current world. We know
>the Web is full of lies, half-truths and mischief, so this should not
>take a huge leap of the imagination. Perhaps some documents can be
>written according to life in fictional universes. So rather than
>describing a soap opera where some person 1 has a fictionalBrother,
>person 2 ... we write simple schema.org markup 'as if it were true',
>and then have document-level annotations about the pages that contain
>those claims.
>
>I'm not sure of the best approach yet, but I'm worried about the
>complexity introduced by shadowing vocabulary (whether types or
>properties) into a parallel hierarchy...
>
>Dan

Received on Tuesday, 19 February 2013 15:57:35 UTC