Re: Expected value for the author property

On 21/03/2014 01:06, David Deering wrote:
> Maybe this is an oversight on my part that I didn't notice it before 
> this week or maybe this is a recent change, but I noticed that on the 
> schema.org/Review page as well as on other pages, the expected value 
> for the author property is Person or Organization. For a long time, 
> the author's name was simply declared with text, and the examples that 
> exist on schema.org as well as in Google's rich snippet guidelines all 
> show the value of the author property as text.  So is this a new 
> standard, and when using the author property, is the expected value 
> now a Person or Organization?  And will declaring the author simply 
> with text no longer suffice?
>
I think author (of any creative work) has always been an Organization or 
Person. It is a feature of schema.org that where text is provided 
instead of some expected type, systems consuming the information should 
do their best to interpret that text sensibly. See the conformance 
statement on http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html.  So, where text is 
found instead of a schema.org Person or Organization type it would be 
natural to interpret that text as the name of a person or organization. 
Much current practice and the examples on schema.org reflect this latitude.

Phil


> Also interesting is the author property's definition: /The author of 
> this content. Please note that author is special in that HTML 5 
> provides a special mechanism for indicating authorship via the rel 
> tag. That is equivalent to this and may be used interchangeably./  If 
> I understand this correctly, it would seem that this is stating that 
> the author could be declared by using the rel=author tag.  But could 
> someone please explain this definition a little more as well as how 
> the author property could/should be declared moving forward, either 
> with or without the rel tag?  Maybe some examples would be nice. :-)
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> David


-- 
<http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/>



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