Re: Person Type & Affiliated Account for Web Service

It's long struck me that schema.org would benefit by incorporating elements
of FOAF OnlineAccount type [1] (FOAF being something with which one person
closely associated with this list has more than a passing acquaintance:).

That is, something like an "account" property for http://schema.org/Personand
http://schema.org/Organization (and more specific types), where an expected
type would include something like "OnlineAccount."

So where we see in FOAF something like this:

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
  <foaf:account>
    <foaf:OnlineAccount>
      <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/OnlineChatAccount"/>
      <foaf:accountServiceHomepage
               rdf:resource="http://www.freenode.net/"/>
      <foaf:accountName>danbri</foaf:accountName>
    </foaf:OnlineAccount>
  </foaf:account>
</foaf:Person>

In schema.org we might see something like this (obviously not exactly
equivalent):

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
  <span itemprop="name">Dan Brickley</span>
  <div itemprop="account" itemscope itemtype="
http://schema.org/OnlineAccount">
    <span itemprop="accountType">Twitter</span>:
    <a itemprop="url" href="https://twitter.com/danbri"><span
itemprop="accountName">danbri</span></a>
  </div>
</div>

Food for thought, I hope?

[1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_OnlineAccount


On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.com> wrote:

> I've been perusing the Person [1] type looking for how to encode a
> person's set of alias/accounts on particular web services (e.g.
> twitter, linkedin, etc.) and I don't see a good property to use for
> such affiliated services.  Did I miss something?
>
> What I would prefer is a new type for a web service for that identifies:
>
>    * the alias/username
>    * the service type (probably by URI)
>
> I could imagine a simple Type of WebService that extends Thing (or
> possibly Intangible).
>
> Then the name, url, etc. properties can be used to describe the
> service.  I would add an 'alias' or 'username' property (I prefer
> 'alias') to represent the user's account on the service.
>
> Finally, I would add a 'webService' property to Person of type
> 'WebService'.
>
>
> [1] http://www.schema.org/Person
>
> --
> --Alex Milowski
> "The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
> inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
> considered."
>
> Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics
>
>


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