~Richard
On 21 Oct 2014, at 01:45, Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com<mailto:sesuncedu@gmail.com>> wrote:
Further clarifying questions:
If someone is looking for a list of British Public Schools, should that list include Eton, Harrow, and Hogwarts?
Depends who/where you are looking. If that somewhere contains all three then yes, but one is also a fictional thing (Hogwarts)
In the context of the Harry Potter books, is Hogwarts a fictional thing?
Yes.
Is the play "Hamlet" a Fictional Thing ?
No it is a real CreativeWork/play, but it’s contents [if described] are fictional things, hence:
Is the play "The Murder of Gonzaga" a Fictional Thing?
Yes.
It would seem unwise to make changes that would have such dramatic effects on all existing application of the schema.org<http://schema.org/> ontology to avoid the use of union types in situations where fictional entities are permitted.
That’s why I prefer multi typing as a solution, it is only applied as and when needed. Not an option lurking in every type inherited from Thing.
[Existence as a predicate of an individual is a controversial stance.
Pegasus says: step away from the metaphysics.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/ ]
If we get too metaphysical on this we are lost. I think we should apply the 'man [or webmaster] in the street' test to this one:
Sometimes I want to assert that somethings are fictional, but I don’t want to have to worry about asserting that real things are not [fictional].
~Richard..