Proposal: Periodicals, Articles and Multi-volume Works

Hi all,

The SchemaBibEx Group<http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/> has completed a significant piece of work to arrive at a proposal to address the basic description of Articles within issues and/or volumes of periodicals of most types - scholarly journals, magazines, comics, etc.   The intention being to establish a basic structure that would be applicable to many areas, which could be built upon in more specific ways for certain domains if need in the future.

The proposal is on the Web Schemas wiki: http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Periodicals,_Articles_and_Multi-volume_Works

It proposes three new Types: Periodical, PublicationVolume, PublicationIssue, and added properties for two existent Types: Article, CreativeWork.

Through this work it became clear that the same framework would also support the description of multi-volume works (e.g.. Lord of the Rings)

We also propose, although it is not our direct area of concern, that the Blog type would then naturally fit in the type hierarchy as a sub-type of our proposed Periodical type.

A couple of issues that arose in our discussions that we would wish to seek comment from the list:
sameAs or url

  *    In one of our examples we reference the uri of another description of the article described:
     *   <a property="sameAs" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2012.682254">10.1080/01639374.2012.682254</a>
  *   The discussion was as to if ‘url’ was the appropriate property to use instead of 'sameAs’.
  *   I shared the majority view that ‘sameAs' was correct.

Stating owl equivalence or not

  *   Some of the proposed properties are derived from the bibo ontology.  Our inclination is to recommend that in the published documentation owl:equivalentClass and owl:equivalentProperty should be included, as against just referencing in text bibo as their inspiration.

Comments welcome.

~Richard