New types for Conversation and Message

[vholland]

Schema.org currently has EmailMessage for describing a message, but there is no way to model other types of messages or link them together as a conversation.

I propose adding:

• Thing > CreativeWork > Conversation: One or more messages between organizations or people on a particular topic.
• Thing > CreativeWork > Message: A single message from a sender to one or more organizations or people. Properties include:
  • sender: Already exists on ReceiveAction.
  • recipient: Already exists on SendAction.
  • dateRead: The date/time at which the message has been read by the recipient if a single recipient exists.
  • messageAttachment: A CreativeWork attached to the message.

We could then move EmailMessage to be a subtype of Message.

[vholland]

See pull request #1021 for examples.

[danbri]

Thanks @vholland. Some scoping questions:

• would a letter e.g. to/from Charles Darwin be a Message in this sense?
• would you expect a page describing such a letter to be described as a Message?
• how about a blog post whose content was explicitly communicative, for example this recent open letter to Stephen Fry about mental health

My intuition is that these kind of thing are mostly not intended core use of the Message type, whereas maybe ...

• Twitter posts, with (and possibly without) '@'-mentions of other users, or '#'-tagging of topics
• Some but not all instances of SocialMediaPosting.
• A http://schema.org/AudioObject (e.g. a Web portal for answerphone messages) or http://schema.org/VideoObject (possibly including message-oriented videos e.g. on youtube

... could be in scope.

How much of threaded forum discussions would this be expected to handle? Are we in https://www.phpbb.com/ territory?

[vholland]

would a letter e.g. to/from Charles Darwin be a Message in this sense?

The letter itself would me a Message.

would you expect a page describing such a letter to be described as a Message?

In this case no. The page itself is a CreativeWork about the Message.

how about a blog post whose content was explicitly communicative, for example this recent open letter to Stephen Fry about mental health

I think this is an edge case where it depends on the intent of the author, but realistically the markup is going to come from the blogging platform, and I doubt we will see anything finer than BlogPosting from those sites. It is too hard to do algorithmically.

My intuition is that these kind of thing are mostly not intended core use of the Message type, whereas maybe ...

How much of threaded forum discussions would this be expected to handle? Are we in https://www.phpbb.com/ territory?

I was thinking Message is more for a small, targeted audience where discussion forums, blogs, etc. are not.

[danbri]

Seems pretty uncontroversial, I'll merge this for review in the upcoming release candidate.

[danbri]

Queued for review as part of sdo-deimos release candidate. see http://webschemas.org/EmailMessage etc.

[danbri]

Closing per http://webschemas.org/docs/releases.html#g1020