Re: Redefine and reuse?

On 23 July 2013 00:11, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
> Hello. The schemaBibEx group is working to fill in some missing properties
> needed for bibliographic data, as well as some that are needed for
> library-specific data. Libraries have long existed in a data silo that has
> kept us apart from other information communities, so we are quite sensitive
> about the importance of reusing elements that have a broader context.
>
> To this end, we have been looking at properties like "Offer" and "sku" to
> handle what libraries have to offer: lending of materials, online access,
> placing of requests (holds). What we are finding, though, is that in many
> cases the definitions of the schema.org terms are rather narrow. "Offer" is
> defined as:
>
> "An offer to sell an item—for example, an offer to sell a product, the DVD
> of a movie, or tickets to an event."
>
> This seems to eliminate offers to lend, to lease, or to barter, or to
> provide other services.
>
> Our question to this group is: Is the community open to proposals regarding
> changes to definitions for terms already in schema.org? Do we anticipate
> that such changes would/would not be disruptive? Or is it preferred that we
> create new terms with new definitions?

It is natural for similar ideas to crop up in different areas of schema.org.

Adding new property/type associations should be relatively
straightforward, though I'm wary of very general notions like 'partOf'
being stretched to apply everywhere.

In the case of Good Relations, it sounds from Martin as if your usage
is a good fit, and if the independent Good Relations spec is updated
we'd very likely track changes into schema.org.

Just for contrast: there is another example of where Good Relations
and the BibExtend work also overlap in their interests: FRBR-like
models.

* The bibliographically-minded world are fascinated by the challenge
of describing mass-produced items that carry intellectual and creative
content.
* The e-commerce-minded world is equally fascinated by the challenge
of describing mass-produced items that can be bought and sold.

The former gives us, amongst other things, FRBR. Which can be
considered as an attempt at articulating functional requirements, or
as a set of specific types: Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Items,
as well as lots of discussions towards some kind of FRBR-lite. The
latter gives us, in Good Relations, the notion of a
http://schema.org/ProductModel which captures the prototypical
characterstics of some family of near-identical items, where a
fictitious exemplar is described as a way of characterizing the larger
set of objects that share that product model.

This strikes me as a case where we could quite reasonably have
different modeling styles in different areas of schema.org, even
though the underlying representational challenges are shared. They
overlap of course when it comes to describing books exposed for
e-commerce. I'd love to see progress towards some convergence, but
equally we ought to be able to make progress without waiting on a
grand unification of all topics. While we don't want things to be
excessively ad-hoc, if we try to integrate everything with everything
we risk ending up with
http://geek-and-poke.com/geekandpoke/2013/7/22/future-proof-your-data-model

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 23 July 2013 12:18:29 UTC