Re: Socialnetworks of a person or organization

Dear Dan,
Before being "follow" use case the capability to represent the social 
presence of a Person or Organization is a simple knowledge 
representation problem.
The main use case is that million of web sites  shows of their first 
page their social presence by linking to their respective social accounts.

Therefore we proposed two ways to encode this:
1. let http://schema.org/socialAccount be a property expecting a URL as 
value. Let update http://schema.org/Person and 
http://schema.org/Organization with this property. Then
  webmasters would represent immediately what they look for, e.g.,

<a itemprop="socialAccount" href="http://twitter.com/johndoe" 
class="icon-twitter">Follow Me on Twitter</a>
<a itemprop="socialAccount" href="http://facebook.com/cocacola" 
class="icon-facebook">Facebook</a>
...

2. Let http://schema.org/SocialAccount be a type and 
http://schema.org/socialAccount be a property expecting URL or 
http://schema.org/SocialAccount as value. Then some, more experienced, 
webmasters would take advantage of the http://schema.org/SocialAccount 
properties inherited from http://schema.org/Thing.

Therefore, I see two issues here:
a) If there is another better representation solution
b) If there are enough use cases to describe social presence of an entity.

Sincerey yours,
Adrian Giurca

On 1/23/2014 10:11 PM, Dan Brickley wrote:
> +Cc: Libby
>
> On 23 January 2014 14:55, Charles McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:19:05 +0100, Stéphane Corlosquet
>> <scorlosquet@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> +1 for some form of account type. What about UserAccount? SocialAccount
>>> sounds a bit specific, in the sense that some accounts might not be
>>> "social" but more like administrative (e.g. admin account). IMO
>>> UserAccount is more generic and can account for both human / social
>>> people, and also inanimate and/or fictional agents.
>> Hmm. I think of this slightly differently and think maybe we should model it
>> as Things (people mostly) being memberOf groups - and potentially also being
>> author of or contributor to content (e.g. a social network feed of some
>> kind).
>>
>> There are people who are *part* of an "account", and who have multiple
>> presence in the same system - and more so for organisations.
>>
>> But I'm only at the beginning of thinking this through.
> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that this stuff is quite fiddly.
>
> I can recap some experience from the FOAF project. We added an
> OnlineAccount type there back ~ 2003,
> http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/2003-July/005588.html
>    For OnlineAccount, http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/#term_OnlineAccount ...
> plus a few properties.
>
> The original name for the relationship between a Person (or foaf:Agent
> e.g. foaf:Organization, foaf:Group) and their OnlineAccount(s) was
> "holdsAccount". At some post-RDFa point we then aliased that to the
> simpler name "account", and explored the idea that the identifier of
> the instances of OnlineAccount would in most cases be an account page
> on some site, which is also more or less what XFN does. The subtypes
> of OnlineAccount were never used much afaik.
>
> Looking back with retrospecs, just having a simple URL to an account
> page e.g. http://twitter.com/danbri covers a lot. But breaking out
> things like "the username associated with this account" can be useful
> too. Another design is to have a kind of indirection and be describing
> something like an addressbook entry in a package (vCard / PoCo
> portablecontacts.net/draft-spec.html etc.) as distinct from the
> general properties of the person/agent that hold it. Worth noting that
> PoCo also has a simple 'account' construct, essentially a top level
> domain + username + userid. This is basically the same model as FOAF's
> OnlineAccount, which has accountName and accountServiceHomepage.
>
> While you can do a lot of interesting things with a "Group"
> construction (e.g. lists / circles, ...) I'm not sure yet about using
> Group for accounts.
>
> The general issue with all this is the need to flip/flop between
> account-oriented and person-oriented information in quite a fluid way.
> Sometimes you'll want to say "Dan knows Charles", other times that
> https://twitter.com/danbri follows https://twitter.com/chaals; but to
> always be providing information at both levels  can be painfully
> verbose.
>
> Stéphane - is this a concrete / practical issue for the Drupal
> schema.org representation? If there are use cases and examples to
> guide the discussion that would be very useful.
>
> Dan
>

-- 
-Adrian
Twitter <http://www.twitter.com/giurca>
LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/adriangiurca>