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

On 5/29/14 2:06 PM, Charles McCathie Nevile wrote:
> 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

+1

-- 

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Kingsley Idehen 
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OpenLink Software
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