Re: Proposal: "associatedMedia" property for schema.org/Thing (was: Why is the video property bound to creative work?)

+1 From over here too

~Richard

On 20 May 2014, at 14:42, Jarno van Driel <jarno@quantumspork.nl<mailto:jarno@quantumspork.nl>> wrote:

Thanks for that Dan1 And of course a big +1 from me.


On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Dan Scott <dan@coffeecode.net<mailto:dan@coffeecode.net>> wrote:
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 12:28:02PM +0200, Jarno van Driel wrote:

<snip>

And just to keep it simple, I'm looking for a property to say something
like:

MedicalProcedure >associatedMedia > VideoObject, or
Product > video > VideoObject

And I'm not all that interested in what the name of this property should
be, as long as I can express the relation in this order, I'm happy. Now
CreativeWork (and it's subClasses) can express this in different ways but
no entity besides that can.

I wonder why and what can be done to fix this?

Well, let's put together a formal proposal to change the domain of the
associatedMedia property to Thing. The benefit is that we would cover
AudioObject, DataDownload, ImageObject, MusicVideoObject, VideoObject,
and any other MediaObject subclass that comes into being.

The adjusted RDFS would look like:

<div typeof="rdf:Property" resource="http://schema.org/associatedMedia">
 <span class="h" property="rdfs:label">associatedMedia</span>
 <span property="rdfs:comment">The media objects that encode or complement this item.</span>
 <span>Domain: <a property="http://schema.org/domainIncludes" href="http://schema.org/Thing">Thing</a></span>
 <span>Range: <a property="http://schema.org/rangeIncludes" href="http://schema.org/MediaObject">MediaObject</a></span>
</div>

Note that the rdfs:comment would no longer include the statement "This
property is a synonym for encodings." This is justifiable because a)
"encodings" is a deprecated term for "encoding" anyway and b) because
"associated media" suggests a looser affiliation with the containing
type (thus the addition of "or complement" to the comment) than
"encoding" which suggests a stricter relationship and c) maintaining
purely synonymous properties where one of the properties has not been
superceded is not a best practice, so let's differentiate the properties
according to their names.

If we wanted to go further, we could deprecate the roughly duplicated
(but more specific) properties by adding "supercededBy" clauses to the
likes of image, audio, and video. But let's not go there; keeping the
simplest things easy to do has a lot of value, and associatedMedia is
most likely to be embraced by those who are seeking to express more than
the simplest of structured data.