RE: Person and fictional Re: VideoGame proposal

Here's how I imagine splitting the hair:

_:A0
a schema:Book;
                schema:name "Anna Karenina";
                schema:fictional false;   # to be pedantic about it
                schema:about _:A1;
                schema:genre "Fiction";
                .

_:A1
                a schema:Person;
                schema:fictional true;
                schema:name "Anna Karenina";
                .



From: chaals@yandex-team.ru [mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru]
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 11:49 AM
To: Dan Scott
Cc: Dan Brickley; Peter F.Patel-Schneider; Wallis,Richard; martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org; Thad Guidry; Karen Coyle; <public-vocabs@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Person and fictional Re: VideoGame proposal



20.10.2014, 17:36, "Dan Scott" <dan@coffeecode.net<mailto:dan@coffeecode.net>>:
On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 11:17 AM, <chaals@yandex-team.ru<mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru>> wrote:
20.10.2014, 14:30, "Dan Brickley" <danbri@google.com<mailto:danbri@google.com>>:
> On 20 October 2014 13:14, Peter F. Patel-Schneider
> <pfpschneider@gmail.com<mailto:pfpschneider@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>  The essence of these proposals is that there is some class or property that
>>  changes the meaning of something else. My worry is that producers and
>>  consumers will need to understand all such classes and properties before
>>  they can use schema.org<http://schema.org/>.
>
> I agree; such mechanisms ought to add knowledge, not change it.

This is the essence of what I was trying to think how to explain.

+1 - I was nodding furiously with your initial post.

So in essence the proposal is to add a new property, http://schema.org/fictional, with a Domain of Thing and a range of Boolean?

That was my proposal. I began thinking of a description (below) and then examples, and the first one I chose was "Leo Tolstoy created the fictional character Anna Karenina in his novel of the same name", where Anna is of type Person with the property fictional, and her name is the text, while the 'novel with the same name' is a CreativeWork. And then it occurred to me that the novel is a real Thing, although it is fictional in nature.

My description scribble: "the thing that has this property is in some way fiction or fictional. Note that a work of fiction may make reference to facts or real things, or may make fictional statements about things that really exist. Likewise, a fictional thing may be based on something known to have existed, or anticipated, such as communications satellites or spacecraft".

Looking at my example, I think this needs a little more thinking. Do we care that a novel is a real thing, but described as fictional? Is Mickey Mouse a real thing as well as fictional? What about Tintin's space rocket?

(The answer might well be "there is no problem here". But if so I'd like others to have decided they are also happy with that).

cheers

This way, if one makes a video game that includes Winston Churchill playing one of the Three Stooges, one can use about="http://www.freebase.com/m/082xp" (per Jeff Young) to identify that the character is based on Winston Churchill but add in fictional="http://schema.org/True" to assert that it's a fictionalized version & please don't aggregate quotes from this game with those of real historical value. I do believe that the property would be additive, not transformative.
That said, I suspect that in practice that the "fiction" property will simply be left out of descriptions of clearly fictional characters, such as Twilight from My Little Pony. And that seems all right too.


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