Indicating main entity / primaryTopic - proposal to use 'schema.org/about'

I think you buried the lede in the github link at the bottom.  :)

In terms of markup would it be reasonable to do this?

<html vocab="http://schema.org">
  <head>
    <link rel="about" href="#main_item"/>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div resource="main_item" typeof="MusicEvent">
      ...
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

and rely on an implicit WebPage subject?


On Tue May 20 2014 at 9:17:25 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:

> On 20 May 2014 11:28, Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Martin, I don't know if I a completely agree about going to the product
> > forum about this. I think I understand why you might say this, but in my
> > thread about the working of WebPage (http://bit.ly/1jyFN0g), Jason
> Douglas
> > said:
> >
> >> "That said, we probably do need a mechanism for indicating the "primary
> >> entity" of a webpage when there is one.  Current clients make up their
> own
> >> heuristics for this, but I think it would be better to have an explicit
> way
> >> of stating that."
> >
> > But this is not the main subject of this thread. Maybe a new thread to
> > discuss the "primary entity" or continuation of the subject in the
> thread I
> > already started is a better place.
>
> This is very much in scope for public-vocabs and for schema.orgdiscussions.
>
> There are a few pieces to the puzzle, but the basic idea is simple.
> Schema.org allows a rich descriptive graph to be embedded in a Web
> page, which means we often have several entities mentioned; we'd like
> to know which one is the main one, if any.
>
> Consider the second example in http://schema.org/MusicEvent to give us
> a concrete focus.
>
> It describes a 'MusicEvent' (a concert), whose 'location' is a
> 'Place'. The event lists multiple associated 'offers'; each 'Offer'
> with price/date etc. info. The event also lists two 'performer's, each
> a 'MusicGroup'.
>
> There is nothing *intrinsically* primary about the event, the
> location, the offers or the musicians. This description is all the
> richer because it mentions multiple entities. If I was forced to pick
> one, I'd probably guess at the MusicEvent being the 'main' entity
> here, because the others feel slightly more like background
> information. But there's no need to leave this to guesswork. If this
> markup was on the homepage of the venue, that publisher might well
> consider the Place to be the main entity. And if it was on an artist's
> homepage, they might want to mention the gig (perhaps alongside
> others) but indicate that the MusicGroup was the main thing.
>
> The above sketches this in terms of embedded structured data, but we
> can also think of this in terms of capturing a very common pattern in
> Web content. Often Web pages _do_ have a focus on a single entity. If
> we add a property like mainEntity, it would give sites a way to make
> this focus explicit.
>
> PROPOSAL:
>
> 1.
> We already have "about", "The subject matter of the content.",
> relating a CreativeWork to a Thing. This is enough to do what we need,
> if we add clarification and examples.
>
> I suggest the description should be updated to  say: "A Thing that is
> the primary subject matter of this CreativeWork".
>
> 2.
> If we want a more SKOS-like, bibliographic and nuanced notion of
> 'subject', I suggest we adopt something like Dublin Core's 'subject'
> to do that work.
>
> (DC has "The topic of the resource."/ "Typically, the subject will be
> represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes.
> Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary.", from
> http://purl.org/dc/terms/ )
>
> The distinction:
>
> if we want to say "This document is about the entity Sweden, i.e. the
> thing that is sameAs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden
> http://www.freebase.com/m/0d0vqn), we would use
> http://schema.org/about   ... i.e. this tells us the main thing that
> the page is about.
>
> but
>
> If we want to say, "This document's topic is “environmental impact of
> the decline of tin mining in Sweden in the 20th century“, we'd be
> going beyond "about" and would want a more bibliographic subject
> description, e.g. using DDC or UDC subject classification codes, SKOS
> etc.
>
> (fictional example, I know nothing about tin mining in Sweden)
>
> My proposal then is that we break out these two use cases, and target
> the 'about' more explicitly on the 'main entity' use case.
>
> 3. Tweak http://schema.org/mentions
>
> We should note that http://schema.org/mentions is a very similar
> notion to http://schema.org/about except that it allows multiple
> different entities to be referenced.
>
> "Indicates that the CreativeWork contains a reference to, but is not
> necessarily about a concept."
>
> I suggest rewording this in terms of entities/things, since we don't
> use 'concept' elsewhere:
>
> "Indicates that the CreativeWork contains a reference to, but is not
> necessarily about some particular thing."
>
> 4. http://schema.org/mainContentOfPage
>
> We already have this strange-looking property. It addresses a
> different use case:
>
> it relates a WebPage to a part of that WebPage,
> "Indicates if this web page element is the main subject of the page."
>
> The wording is awkward. It should be something like "Indicates the
> main element within some Web page." since the expected type is
> WebPageElement.
>
> I'm not convinced that the various types we have under WebPageElement
> ("A web page element, like a table or an image") really work, but the
> important point here is that they address a different scenario. A
> WebPageElement is a piece of markup, like SiteNavigationElement,
> Table, WPAdBlock, WPFooter, WPHeader, WPSideBar. This is a different
> idea to the problem of finding the main *entity* that all this markup
> is describing.
>
> HTML already a <main> element, see
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/main
>
> "The HTML <main> element represents the main content of  the <body> of
> a document or application. The main content area consists of content
> that is directly related to, or expands upon the central topic of a
> document or the central functionality of an application. This content
> should be unique to the document, excluding any content that is
> repeated across a set of documents such as sidebars, navigation links,
> copyright information, site logos, and search forms (unless, of
> course, the document's main function is as a search form)."
>
> I believe most of the use cases for mainContentOfPage are better
> addressed by <main>.
>
> However <main> does not help us pick out a single highlighted entity:
> the main section of a Web page could still contain microdata/rdfa or
> json-ld mentioning lots of different entities.
>
> It is useful sometimes to know that structured data markup comes from
> footers or boilerplate rather than the <main> section of a page, and
> it is probably worth including some examples of this on the schema.org
> site.
>
>
> 5. Avoiding ratholes
>
> If we can please discuss this without slipping into discussion of
> http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/14 I'd be happy. There
> are places in schema.org usage where we tolerate an URL for a WebPage
> being used in place of an URL that is more explictly for the
> real-world entity itself. For example in http://schema.org/Person we
> write "<a href="http://www.xyz.edu/students/alicejones.html"
> itemprop="colleague">Alice Jones</a>".
>
> Clarifying the use of 'about' as above could help such pages clarify
> which real world entity they are 'about'. This won't solve every issue
> around entity disambiguation, but it will improve the basic support we
> have within schema.org for stating such distinctions when we want to.
>
> (Sorry this was such a long mail...)
>
> Finally, let's also try not to get stuck on syntax issues at this
> stage. We'll have to find the best patterns in Microdata/RDFa and
> JSON-LD that we can for this, and it may sometimes be tricky. Here's
> an attempt at amending the MusicEvent example by adding a WebPage and
> 'about' - https://gist.github.com/anonymous/cf7e24f6378b176aa010 . We
> might want to discuss a reverse property that could be expressed on
> the entity rather than the page, for example.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2014 16:31:20 UTC