offeredBy to supersede vendor, merchant, provider, seller, …?

Trying to clean little corners where dust collects:

We currently have

http://schema.org/seller
http://schema.org/vendor
http://schema.org/merchant
http://schema.org/provider
http://xkcd.com/927

all of which point to the entity who agrees, or may agree, to give  
something to or do something for you. (Roughly. It could be to someone  
else…, or for some third party, or…)

Working backwards from "provider", which can describe e.g. the issuer of a  
airplane ticket, we were concerned that it is easy to confuse it with the  
use of "serviceOperator" - the entity that does the actual work involved  
in the deal, such as the airline who flies the plane in the ticket  
example. (Actually In "Flight" this is currently called "carrier", but we  
propose to change that and align it with "GovernmentService").

It seems to make more sense to use something like "offeredBy" - although  
we cannot make ambiguity impossible, this seems to reduce the risk to a  
better level.

Having got to that point, it seemed to make sense to supersede all four of  
the above properties with offeredBy. It isn't clear that there is enough  
difference between them to justify keeping 4 different terms.

Before storming into the schema.org site and imposing such a decision, are  
there reasons why this is a bad idea, and we should retain the current  
setup?

Or do people think we should have done this last week already?

Could we use a chain of "offeredBy" relationships instead of having a  
bookingAgent for a reservation?

E.g. My flight serviceProvider is Lufthansa, the Flight is offeredBy ANA  
who sold the ticket, but the ticket itself was offeredBy  
CheapFlightsLimited to me as a consumer…

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2014 18:07:35 UTC