To all,
Richard is spot on, but note the use could be beyond just creative works
sometimes as well.
Martin, I have my biases, please let me keep them. :) The web is still
cheap, and free.
I agree with Dan, we should not be in the "dictatorship" business or
"authority" business for that matter, and ruling over a person or
organizations bias in any domain.
We're going to need some kind of FictionalThing or "SpecialThing" at the
top-level. Which is a really bad way to say it, I know...but... what it
really is saying is that a Thing is "interesting, in a special way" for
someone, or some publisher, or some user. That is a more approachable, and
un-offending way to say it. The purpose of such a Type really just helps
with filtering, faceting, or subscribing to a particular bias of the
publisher, users, whomever. We like our unique biases, don't we?, we just
need a way to deal with our "SpecialThings" or "FavoriteThings" or
"UnThing". All of which sounds a bit ridiculous and so FictionalThing is
the name we're stuck with, unless someone has a really swell alternative
name or synonym to say "interesting".
I agree that it may be tempting for Guha or others to want to re-use Thing
and deal with "fictitious" as a property, but that is the wrong way to deal
with it in my opinion. My LegendaryCreature needs special properties, btw,
like his particular, very wide BirthPartition (lol, not hereditary, so
don't worry, which other FictionalThing's may or may not have, or been born
"through", lol.)
Anyways, you eventually see the need to have to deal with special
attributes and properties that only a particular FictionalThing will have
requirements for across varying FictionalUniverses. And it is not just
written content I am talking about, mind you,...since FictionalThing could
be used to scope beyond written content and dive into theory, philosophy,
and mathematics, to name a few. But some limits put into the description
will probably suffice for dealing with the intended scope for now.
Freebase came to the same conclusion and we created many Types for
fictional things but skipped creating a single umbrella FictionalThing, but
where all those Fictional Types can be optionally bound under a Fictional
Universe (the special domain that a set of FictionalThings reside or are a
part of), take a look at the many FictionalThings we already have:
http://dev.freebase.com/fictional_universe. This helps with filtering
content or entities within a particular FictionalUniverse, or special
domain that are "interesting" to some consumers, publishers, or users, if
they so desire or subscribe to that particular special domain's bias.
A final WARNING note to all: We should definitely avoid letting loose a
"SpecialThing" under a "SpecialDomain" which results in splitting off
domain experts to avoid reuse of all the hard work done towards common
types in Schema.org and instead allow creating all new Type structures
under "SpecialDomains" instead of sharing the collective wisdom we are
creating. Let's not allow that to ever happen, please. To borrow the
environmental phrase: We should Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - when we can.
--
-Thad
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry