Need award/championship entity

[martinbean]

I work a lot with professional wrestling and MMA (mixed martial arts) websites. Both activities see competitors contend for championships. Other activities see participants compete for awards.

It would be good if an Award type could be added to the schema.org specification to mark up such entities:

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Award">
  <h1 itemprop="name">WWE Universal Championship</h1>
  <p>
    <strong>Current champion:</strong>
    <span itemprop="currentHolder" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
      <span itemprop="name">Brock Lesnar</span>
    </span>
  </p>
</article>

[RichardWallis]

This is an overlap with the discussions around Educational Courses and Credentials awarded see (#195) and mailing list thread.

Also see close issue (#989).

Agree we need something in this area but it should be part of a broad solution.

[martinbean]

but it should be part of a broad solution.

What do you mean by this?

[danbri]

/cc @vholland was was involved at the time.

I'd suggest the nearest large cluster of topics would be those around sports, and that our neighbouring Sports Schema community group at W3C is a good place to take these discussions.

Background -

A couple years ago Jason Johnson (then of Microsoft/Bing) was leading our Sports effort. Since he moved on things have gone a bit quiet. You can see how far we got at the time here: http://blog.schema.org/2014/02/schemaorg-sports-vocabulary.html

Working notes from that period are in W3C's Wiki, https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Sports

See https://www.w3.org/wiki/File:2014SportsVocabularyProposalv2.pdf (PDF) for a draft that addressed the competitions use case. The design was never finalized. You can find previous discussions in the W3C public-vocabs list e.g. searching on "sports proposal".

[danbri]

I should also mention that we do have a simple textual property, http://schema.org/awards which can capture something of this, in a limited way.

[martinbean]

@danbri Thanks, but I need something that describes a championship as a standalone entity, as per my example above. (I have a page that lists championships that I wanted to mark up.)

[danbri]

@martinbean for now then I think our answer is, "thanks for the suggestion! we don't currently have such vocabulary".

Since we have over 400 open issues I'll close this issue as I've noted your suggestion in #2 which is where we track and cross-reference such proposals. Sorry we don't have anything for you right now, and do feel to stick around and discuss further if you like. Thanks again!

(and to be clear, a closed issue shouldn't stop further discussion...)

[martinbean]

@danbri Cheers, Dan.

How would one get involved in the ongoing Schema.org development? I’d rather be a bit more proactive than just going, “It should have this.”

[danbri]

You're doing it, pretty much. We ask serious contributors to join the W3C group, https://www.w3.org/community/schemaorg/ but much of the discussion and implementation takes place here. Ultimately we'll need to settle on a set a specific design and its detailed specification in files that look like https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/blob/sdo-callisto/data/ext/pending/issue-195.rdfa

For now it would be great just to capture usecases and exemplar websites. We can't handle every scenario in detail within our vocabulary so some evidence indicating that lots of sites have this kind of content, sample URLs etc, helps...

[martinbean]

@danbri Hi, Dan. I’m really interesting in helping to craft definitions for Schema.org, starting with an Award entity. I’ve joined the W3C community. How do I become a more involved member? Is there a new lead on Sports schemas that I could liaise with?

To offer a suggestion, I see a (more generic) Award entity having these properties:

• name
• dateEstablished
• dateRetired
• awardingBody (Organization)
• currentHolder (Person or Organization)
• lastHolder (i.e. if the Award is retired)
• holders (a collection of all holders of the Award)

I suppose a generic Award entity could then be extended to non-combat sport contexts, i.e. Nobel Prize, Academy Award etc.

I’d love to start a discussion around this particular entity and help progress it to becoming an official schema.

[martinbean]

Ping @danbri