Re: Socialnetworks of a person or organization

Revisiting this and the recent socialAccount thread,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Apr/0046.html

There seems to be broad agreement that it would be good for schema.org
to recommend a pattern for marking up links to (broadly) social
network profile pages, e.g. Twitter. However a few people have raised
the concern that adding another property will add more confusion
around existing options, particularly 'url' and 'sameAs'.

Therefore, a minimalistic revised proposal: that we address this
scenario using 'sameAs' directly.

I suggest http://schema.org/sameAs
"URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's
identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or
official website." therefore becomes
"URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's
identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, a
profile page on a social site, or official website."

We should also add examples at least for Person, Organization and
MusicGroup to illustrate this.

Following the example in the wiki at
https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SocialAccountProperty the usage
then would be something like:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<span itemprop="name">Stephen Fry</span>
    (<a itemprop="url" href="http://www.stephenfry.com/">stephenfry.com</a>,
     <a itemprop="sameAs" href="http://twitter.com/stephenfry">twitter</a>,
<a itemprop="sameAs"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry">wikipedia</a>)
</div>

This has the advantage of not requiring the (endlessly evolving and
slippery) notion of 'social' to be defined. Or 'account' for that
matter. It removes some worry for publishers, "am I using
'socialAccount' when I should be using 'sameAs' or vice-versa?). It
carries a little less meaning, but not a lot. Someone writing an app
to find twitter links will know just what they need to do. If your
goal is to sort 'social' from 'other kinds of authority page', you'll
need out-of-band information of some kind. But that was likely also
going to be the case even if we added a new property 'socialAccount'.

How does this sound?

Dan
  (sameAs <http://twitter.com/danbri/>)

p.s. just a reminder, schema.org's notion of sameAs allows for
identity reference pages as values, e.g. hints for entity
identification. It does not mean 'numerical identity', i.e.
self-same-thing; for that you could use owl:sameAs.

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2014 15:11:45 UTC