Re: Semantically marking up a "checklist" or process

I support Martin's suggestion. This would also better model the common
structure of "top 10 lists", such as these:

http://www.zagat.com/l/boston/great-restaurants-for-ribs-in-boston
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2012/01/san_franciscos_top_10_burritos.php
http://guestofaguest.com/new-york/nightlife/downtown-nyc-happy-hour-10-bars-to-check-out-after-work-today

Note that in the last 2 of these 3 cases, the list is separated over
multiple web pages, which makes it crucial to model the position number
explicitly rather than trying to infer it from the container.

I think ListItem should not be a subtype of WebPageElement - that's just
confounding two things and adding a bunch of needless subproperties. It can
live under schema.org/StructuredValue with other similar types.

I would suggest that itemPosition be 1-based, rather than 0-based, since
that is by far the predominant usage for all the use cases discussed above.

Justin






On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 2:54 AM, Martin Hepp <
martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> Hi Amit,
> If the goal is to merely capture the elements of a checklist as a list
> structure, then
>
>     http://schema.org/ItemList
>
> should IMO provide all that is needed.
>
> In RDFa or other RDF syntaxes, this of course means loosing the order of
> the items, as Vicki Tardif already pointed out.
>
> A simple solution would be to
>
> 1. define a type ListItem with an additional property
>
> itemPosition Number The position of the item in an ordered list 0 = first,
> 1 = second, ...
>
> We could also reuse
>
>         http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#displayPosition
>
> for that; it serves a similar purpose.
>
> 2. expand the range of the itemListElement from Text to Text or ListItem
>
> That should do the trick. At least I guess you could immediately mark up
> all of the example pages you listed.
>
> By the way, we should discuss whether ItemList should rather become a
> subtype of http://schema.org/WebPageElement, since we have Table there,
> so we may also want to have List there. A counter argument is that while
> Table is a significant Web page element type, List is a more generic data
> structure and not constrained to Web pages. (But then again, some tables
> outside of HTML markup, e.g. in JSON-LD or CSV, are also not
> WebPageElements in the strict sense).
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> On Sep 9, 2013, at 5:44 PM, TallyFy wrote:
>
> > Some examples  ...
> >
> > Web:
> >
> http://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/cleaning/fall-cleaning-checklist-00000000000928/index.html
> > http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page
> >
> http://www.realsimple.com/weddings/dress-attire/wedding-gown-shopping-checklist-00000000000200/index.html
> > http://terrymorris.net/bestpractices/
> >
> > Gov:
> > https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-checklist
> > https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hurricane-supply-checklist(in a pdf)
> > http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/ncp/repository (a simpler version would be
> great!)
> >
> > Health:
> > http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Healthyhearts/Pages/Arrhythmiachecklist.aspx
> >
> > I proposed this initiative just to wrap steps in a checklist. The
> capture of content from each step or conditional stuff is out of range and
> is a user interaction. There's many examples in the book "The Checklist
> Manifesto" by Dr. Atul Gawande:
> > http://gawande.com/the-checklist-manifesto
> >
> > When Tallyfy launches in a few months, we will have some too.
> >
> > thanks
> > Amit
> > On Monday, 9 September 2013 at 15:39, Martin Hepp wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Jason:
> >>> Process modeling is a rat hole and way out of scope, IMO
> >>
> >> I fully agree ;-)
> >>
> >> But even if you decide to add a very simple mechanism for exposing
> structured "step-by-step" info, I think that both
> >> a) explicit control flows (step x follows step x) and
> >> b( patterns for declarative approaches should be added (like
> "dependsOn" and "consequence" or"nextStep").
> >>
> >> Is the proposal under discussion here driven by actual use cases? If
> such, it would be good to have a couple of sites at hand that currently
> expose such checklist or process information.
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sep 9, 2013, at 4:33 PM, Jason Douglas wrote:
> >>
> >>> Yipes. I thought this thread was just about understanding "howto"
> content pages in a structured way. Process modeling is a rat hole and way
> out of scope, IMO.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 4:17 AM, Martin Hepp <
> martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Sep 9, 2013, at 1:00 PM, Tallyfy wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Are Wil and Jan members of this list?
> >>> I don't know, but I don't think so.
> >>>
> >>>> 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
> >>>>>
> >>>>> e-mail: hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> >>>>> phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> >>>>> fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> >>>>> www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
> >>>>> http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> >>>>> skype: mfhepp
> >>>>> twitter: mfhepp
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
> >>>>> =================================================================
> >>>>> * Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/
> >>>
> >>> --------------------------------------------------------
> >>> martin hepp
> >>> e-business & web science research group
> >>> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
> >>>
> >>> e-mail: hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> >>> phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> >>> fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> >>> www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
> >>> http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> >>> skype: mfhepp
> >>> twitter: mfhepp
> >>>
> >>> Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
> >>> =================================================================
> >>> * Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/
> >>
> >> --------------------------------------------------------
> >> martin hepp
> >> e-business & web science research group
> >> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
> >>
> >> e-mail: hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> >> phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> >> fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> >> www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
> >> http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> >> skype: mfhepp
> >> twitter: mfhepp
> >>
> >> Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
> >> =================================================================
> >> * Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/
> >
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
>          http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> skype:   mfhepp
> twitter: mfhepp
>
> Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
> =================================================================
> * Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/
>
>
>
>
>