Re: Circa. dates

I concur with both Jeff and Dan here.

Jeff’s innovative use of the Role type to extend the capabilities around a particular property is a good one, and maybe a tweak to the schema:roleName could open up other such potential for this useful mechanism.

However I also believe Dan is right to question this approach in this circumstance "From the perspective of markup mechanics (simplicity being one of the primary reasons for schema.org<http://schema.org/> in the first place), asking webmasters to reify date properties via Role for the sake of saying "around 1850" seems much more extreme..."

Proposing an schema:circa property for Thing also would complicate the issue as it implies, for consistency, that you would need to move schema:dateCreated to Thing.  It would be inconsistent to be able to define the approximate date of anything but only an accurate date for a CreativeWork.

Personally I believe that creating subTypes Date is still a good pragmatic solution to the requirement(s)

~Richard

On 3 Mar 2015, at 15:16, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org<mailto:jyoung@oclc.org>> wrote:

Perhaps the description of schema:roleName could be tweaked to make it more general.

As I see it, schema:Role is a form of reification that can make intractable problems easy again. As it’s description says, It is a way to “represent[] additional information about a relationship or property”. It would be a shame if the possibilities for this was limited by narrow language on schema:roleName.

Jeff

From: Dan Scott [mailto:dan@coffeecode.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 9:57 AM
To: Young,Jeff (OR)
Cc: Karen Coyle; SchemaDot Org
Subject: Re: Circa. dates

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org<mailto:jyoung@oclc.org>> wrote:
One option would be to use schema:Role to split schema:circa in two halves and then use schema:roleName to assign the specific property that is being fudged. It's just another example of what Role is for.

Given that http://schema.org/roleName is defined as "A role played, performed or filled by a person or organization.", that seems like a stretch for Role.

>From the perspective of markup mechanics (simplicity being one of the primary reasons for schema.org<http://schema.org/> in the first place), asking webmasters to reify date properties via Role for the sake of saying "around 1850" seems much more extreme than just adopting the proposed extension to ISO8601. Reifying the property would also make the use of the otherwise standard <time datetime=""> construct confusing.

Dan