My small contribution to schema.org this week

Version 1.91 of the http://schema.org vocabulary was released a few days ago, and I once again had a small part to play in it.

With the addition of the workExample and exampleOfWork properties, we (Richard Wallis, Dan Brickley, and I) realized that examples of these CreativeWork example properties were desperately needed to help clarify their appropriate usage. I had developed one for the blog post that accompanied the launch of those properties, but the question was, where should those examples live in the official schema.org docs? CreativeWork has so many children, and the properties are so broadly applicable, that it could have been added to dozens of type pages.

It turns out that an until-now unused feature of the schema.org infrastructure is that examples can live on property pages; even Dan Brickley didn't think this was working. However, a quick test in my sandbox showed that it _was_ in perfect working order, so we could locate the examples on their most relevant documentation pages... Huzzah!

I was then able to put together a nice, juicy example showing relationships between a Tolkien novel (The Fellowship of the Ring), subsequent editions of that novel published by different companies in different locations at different times, and movies based on that novel. From this librarian's perspective, it's pretty cool to be able to do this; it's a realization of a desire to express relationships that, in most library systems, are hard or impossible to accurately specify. (Should be interesting to try and get this expressed in Evergreen and Koha...)

In an ensuing conversation on public-vocabs about the appropriateness of this approach to work relationships, I was pleased to hear Jeff Young say "+1 for using exampleOfWork / workExample as many times as necessary to move vaguely up or down the bibliographic abstraction layers."... To me, that's a solid endorsement of this pragmatic approach to what is inherently messy bibliographic stuff.

Kudos to Richard for having championed these properties in the first place; sometimes we're a little slow to catch on!