- From: Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net>
- Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 08:07:48 -0700
- To: public-vocabs@w3.org
On 9/12/13 7:42 AM, Dan Scott wrote: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:14:10PM +1000, Renato Iannella wrote: >> >> Thanks for that Dan...some feedback... >> >> "schema.org/Offer" include "rights", "service" and is probably missing >> "product"....but I wonder if it is better to define Offer more on the >> process rather than the list of things that can be offered. We seem to >> use the generic "item" for anything...so perhaps a cleaner definition >> could be: "To present an item for consideration". We also batted around something using the term "exchange" - that would mean essentially "offer A in exchange for B". But that, too, had some problems for free goods and services, where there is no quid pro quo. > > Right. It took me a while to figure out why "item" seems to have special > meaning in the schema.org docs, but I eventually realized that the usage > of "item" is more generally tied to the semantic types being marked up > (which explains the microdata itemtype / itemscope property names and > the references to "item" in the RDFa spec, for example). For those > coming to schema.org without that broader context, then, I'm concerned > that "item" is going to strongly suggest material goods rather than the > more inclusive products-and-services. (But perhaps that's based too much > on my own thick-headedness!) Well, we might be equally thick-headed, but "item" does feel like it has materiality that wouldn't cover services or other intangibles. > >> BTW, it would be good if schema.org allowed definitions to standalone, >> and not force the "for example" text into the definitions (not good >> 11179 ;-) and added a notes metadata attribute... > > I, too, admit to feeling a little discomfort about the heavy reliance on > examples in the definitions. It might be interesting to put together an > experimental draft that separates the inline examples from the > definitions, at least for a subset of the vocabulary: I suspect that it > would end up pushing us to strengthen the definitions in the long run. Unless our definitions become highly Wittgensteinian, and therefore nearly incomprehensible, I don't think we can do without the examples in the definition text. We need a simple definition that can be understood by folks with a wide range of English language skills, and that means that those definitions will be ambiguous (in most cases) without examples in the definition. I suppose that we could break up the definition pre- and post-"such as", but I wouldn't want to see the definition displayed ever without that "such as" portion. I think we all know that folks rely heavily on code examples (I'm a copy/paste/edit coder, myself) and more of those should be provided. Because the pages are often quite long for a single property or class, it might be useful to have a link from the top of the page to the examples (which would remind newcomers that there are examples on the pages). kc -- Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
Received on Thursday, 12 September 2013 15:08:16 UTC