schema.org as reconstructed from the human-readable information at schema.org

I read over the human-readable web pages at schema.org (except for some of the type and property pages there) and came up with the following reconstruction of what schema.org is, ignoring anything to do with the surface syntaxes of schema.org.

Comments are welcome, particularly comments that include evidence that particular parts of the reconstruction below do not correspond to human-readable information available at schema.org or that there is significant human-readable information available at schema.org that is not reflected here.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Nuance Communications


NB:  Texts in () are obvious extensions, as far as I am concerned, of the
     human-readable information in schema.org, except those ending in ?,
     which are not so obvious to me. 
NB:  Some of this reconstruction does not match the schema.org in X
     documents.  If I couldn't find any human-readable documentation for
     something in one of these machine-readable documents then that
     something is not included here. 
     Conversely, if there is something in the human-readable information in
     schema.org that doesn't show up in the machine-readable documents or
     contradicts something in the machine-readable documents, then that
     something is included here.
NB:  There are some subtle pieces of the reconstruction below, which don't
     mean what one might expect (e.g., text values vs data values)


Types
  There is a collection of types, with two roots, http://schema.org/Thing
  and http://schema.org/Datatype, organized in a multi-parent
  (generalization) taxonomy.   
  Each type is a URL under http://schema.org/.  
  All the types directly under http://schema.org are specified in schema.org
  Some types are enumeration types, (whose elements are one of a set of URLs?).
  Some types are datatypes.
  Each type has a collection of allowable properties.
  Subtypes of types can be created by appending /... to a type URL.
Datatypes
  There are the following datatypes with appropriate data values
    Boolean, Date, DateTime, Number (Float, Integer), Text (URL), Time

Properties
  There is a collection of properties, organized in a (single-parent?)
  taxonomy with multiple roots.
  Each property is a string.  
  Properties can have any number of ranges each of which are types.
  Each value for the property in an item should have one of the range types
  (for the property itself, not including the range types of any parent)
  as (an ancestor of) (one of?) its types (or otherwise belong to the type).
  Properties are not restricted to starting with the properties specified in
  schema.org 
  Subproperties can be created by appending /... to a property.

Items
  Items are things in the world, including information things
  Items can have a type (or types?)
  Items can have one or more property-value pairs, where
    the property is an allowable property for the type (one of the types?)
    of the item or one of its ancestors 
    and the value is either a data value, a piece of text, or an item 
  Some items are described by a web page at a particular URL (URL property)
  Some items can be identified by a URL (sameAs property)
  Some items have names, images, descriptions, and additionalTypes

Received on Friday, 25 October 2013 01:14:09 UTC