Re: Semantically marking up a "checklist" or process

Are Wil and Jan members of this list?

Without prejudice to some work here that may result in a simple and web-friendly spec, I think some organisation to reach the goal of defining explicit control flow would be highly rewarding -  since it would represent a necessary evolution beyond machine-understandable markup and entities. How entities are a constituent of higher level goals and processes is probably the real answer to better search. If not search, they would be a very interesting in terms of knowledge discovery - such as being to ask 'What happens at the Chile embassy [location]?' in Sam's example, to use just one permutation of many possible questions. Bringing all this to a scale such as the web would be very exciting.

We at Tallyfy can help to define and implement Process markup, but we are one of many others. Is there a way that a project with some organisation can be spawned from this discussion?

Thanks,
Amit

On 9 Sep 2013, at 11:33, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> All:
> If you really want to embark into process modeling in schema.org, then you should first become clear about 
> 
> - whether you want to model processes in procedural fashion (explicit control flow) or a declarative fashion (modeling a set of actions and their pre- and post-conditions), and 
> - whether the process models should be executable by a computer or merely documents for human consumption. 
> 
> Hundreds of researchers have worked on understanding how processes can be modeled in the context of information systems, and the least one can say is that
> 
> 1. it is hard and
> 2. quick, simple approaches don't work or don't scale or both.
> 
> See e.g.
> 
>    http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/top/download/publications/fahlandlmrwwz_2009_emmsad.pdf
> 
> for a brief overview.
> 
> Without excluding others, I think it would make a lot of sense to involve 
> 
>    Wil van der Aalst,  http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/~wvdaalst/
> and
> 
>    Jan Mendling, http://www.wu.ac.at/infobiz/team/mendling
> 
> in any such draft. They both spent years of their lives into understanding the challenges of process modeling...
> 
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> 
> On Sep 6, 2013, at 10:04 PM, Vicki Tardif Holland wrote:
> 
>> I think a combination of Jason's suggestion of http://schema.org/ItemList and something similar to http://schema.org/Recipe would do the trick. The key difference is that you probably want to specify the step number instead of relying on page layout as parsers often discard the order of elements.
>> 
>> Vicki
>> 
>> Vicki Tardif Holland | Metadata Analyst | vtardif@google.com | 978-613-9630
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 7:17 AM, Tallyfy <hello@tallyfy.com> wrote:
>> "Process" sounds very promising as a purely top-level construct, because any serial process (not related to a "thing" but maybe with embedded references to things) can be wrapped and labelled as an actionable container. http://schema.org/Recipe is the same concept as this, but only relates to food recipes.
>> 
>> We subscribe the Gates quote - "the future of search is verbs" and interpret it as machines able to understand not just content, but processes like "How to get a Chile tourist visa for British citizens" - an ordered list of steps. Rankings for processes are also different to content backlinks, which we are working on, as you could define pre-requisites (do this before doing this) and chain processes after (after doing this - continue with this).
>> 
>> Could somebody help me propose this as a new item? I have no idea where to start. 
>> 
>> thanks
>> Amit
>> http://tallyfy.com
>> On Thursday, 5 September 2013 at 17:36, Sam Goto wrote:
>> 
>>> Maybe an ItemList (or a specialized subclass, e.g. http://schema.org/Process) of http://schema.org/Action and its subclasses?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:33 AM, Tallyfy <hello@tallyfy.com> wrote:
>>>> The list may not be about a specific thing, but a process - which could include many things. For example - the list, "How to enjoy a great Saturday night in" might have a reference to a food - pizza AND a movie - as an entity, etc. Granted, the example isn't the best, but it's entirely unrelated to any specific thing.
>>>> 
>>>> In the composite scenario (which might not even have any linked entities) - I guess there might not even be a thing here at all, it's quite specifically a set of steps with an objective. For example "What to look out for when buying a house in London"
>>>> 
>>>> So to clarify, this isn't to enumerate objects or things into a determined order like "Top 10" - it's to define actionable things as steps - whether or not there's related entities.
>>>> 
>>>> A
>>>> On Thursday, 5 September 2013 at 17:24, Jason Douglas wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Maybe a new subclass of ItemList?  
>>>>> 
>>>>> Aside: seems like ItemListElement should have a range of Thing so you could do structured lists (movies, steps, etc.).
>>>>> 
>>>>> -jason
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 2:44 AM, Tallyfy <hello@tallyfy.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I run a startup called http://tallyfy.com
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> We've just been enrolled into StartupChile, and aim to launch within a few months using their help. Our homepage looks something like this:
>>>>>> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14563542/tallyfy.png
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> What we do is allow anyone to embed knowledge as steps in a checklist or a process. Examples might be:
>>>>>>    • How to bake a carrot cake
>>>>>>    • How to change a bicycle tyre
>>>>>>    • What to pack if you're visiting the Amazon rainforest
>>>>>>    • My bucket list
>>>>>> The clearest and most obvious point to make here is that these checklists, when marked up via schema.org would be excellent ways to present answers to questions without people going through many pages on search engines.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> So I wanted to propose a schema for marking up a checklist (or a process).. If there is one already - could someone point me to it?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> If we could understand that this is a "set of steps for doing something" - I think that would be very valuable, not just to search but for people looking for knowledge which is actionable, not just web pages. In other words, an actual set of steps marked up is more valuable than a block of content (usually using <ol> or <ul> HTML) which blends into a web page.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> We intend to do a lot more - you can measure how many people did a checklist, how long it took on average, reviews, etc. so perhaps those could incorporate into this schema.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> thanks
>>>>>> Amit
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
> 
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Received on Monday, 9 September 2013 11:05:42 UTC