Re: Schema.org Sports Vocabulary Proposal

On Feb 6, 2014, at 7:17 PM, Dan Scott <dan@coffeecode.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 5:59 PM, Gregg Kellogg <gregg@greggkellogg.net> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> The teamSpecificRoles also seem a bit narrow, and people may play multiple roles. Roles might better be modeled with something like a "Contribution" class; we discussed this for the TV and Radio updates, although nothing much came about from it. A person may contribute to a sports team using multiple roles. This also allows modeling finer grained sports activities such as a season, series, game, period, or individual play. The roles can then be defined using an enumeration class similarly to sports disciplines. Per-sport role properties are simpler, but also suffer from the cost of adding them specifically to the vocabulary rather than allowing the use of external enumerations.
> 
> This is also an issue in the latest draft of the Comics proposal that I'm working on; once we can base it on Periodicals, most of the remaining new properties are roles like artist, colorist, inker, letterer, penciler... but defining all of the potential contribution roles for every other potential domain seems like it is at best a duplicative effort of work that has been done elsewhere.I mentioned a potential approach back in September, and Niklas replied with an alternative (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2013Sep/0190.html), but the discussion fizzled out at that point.
> 
> Thinking about it further, having a Contributor type that extends Person by adding a "contributionType" property, which in turn points at an external enumeration (falling back to a literal value, of course) might suffice. For the sports context, SportsPlayer could then extend Contributor and add in the "hasStatistics" property so that that property doesn't have to be defined at the Person level.

I don't follow how a contributionType helps, as you can't relate a Contributor's association with a SportsTeam or Event with the type of contribution without using an intermediate object.

At the most specific level of an individual play, I modeled this using PlayAction, which acts something like a Contributor as well, as you can separately relate event, agent and participant. It does require another way to describe the kind of play, but this could presumably be done with an additionalType and an enumeration object. Using ExcerciseAction provides more useful properties, but the name's not really appropriate for this. Perhaps if something like SportingAction were introduced between PlayAction and ExerciseAction having most of the properties from ExerciseAction, this would solve the problem. We could then add a sportsPlayType to reference an entity describing the type of play, also falling back to a literal. For example, "hit", "goal", "fumble", ...

> Perhaps it's worthwhile taking another kick at this? As Aaron Bradley has mentioned (https://plus.google.com/106943062990152739506/posts/VTdFR5R2PMs) if we go with external enumerations, providing some clear direction on which enumerations are acceptable will be important to implementers (I think the use of GoodRelations / ProductOntology for external enumerations set a nice example here). As for which external enumerations to use, I'm open to suggestions; the LC relators (http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators.html) offer a decent start, but while they hit some of the radio, TV, and movie roles, they're certainly not exhaustive; they don't cover all of the roles in the Comics realm; and they don't even touch the sports realm.

External enumerations should really be used more than schema-specific types for things like this, as it removes unnecessary central control for such concepts.

Gregg