Description
Relaying from a conversation with Sally and Subbu from the TrustProject.
We looked over their efforts around author/producer info for per-article pages. It seems the majority can be described using existing schema.org, but there are a couple of areas where additional improvements would help.
- Language(s) that an article author speaks / has competency in.
Desire here is for a fairly simple characterization of basic language ability, e.g. some journalist knows enough to talk to someone or read/write, but not a strong need to distinguish reading-vs-writing-vs-speaking, nor "wants to learn" vs "is learning" vs "solid" vs "expert" vs "native speaker", etc.
Expectation is that a property would take language codes (as strings or Language objects, along lines of http://schema.org/inLanguage which says "Please use one of the language codes from the IETF BCP 47 standard."). Perhaps in future as educational/learning metadata for competencies and skills grows, we might go deeper --- either language specific or more generally.
- Expertise
There is a desire to characterize the special expertise of an author, implicitly focussing on the expertise that is most pertinent either to the article at hand or the publishing site / organization.
- We noted that the Text-valued "skills" property already existed for JobPosting, and could be generalized.
- We noted that expertise in a topic is subtly but importantly different from skill in it, examples might include neuroscience, nanotechnology, and foreign policy. We can't plausibly recycle "skills" to mean "expertise".
- We noted that unique ID concept codes for such things are attractive in general (e.g. for jobs etc.) but are unlikely to be commonly used in journalistic settings.
- We suggest adding "expertise" and having both it and a tweaked "skills" property also accept the http://schema.org/Specialty (which is currently and perhaps incorrectly listed as an Enumeration).
- We noted a particular use case for indicating local expertise, for example some author might be a "Person" with "expertise" which is a "Specialty" which has an association with a "Place" e.g. Tampa Florida (e.g. sameAs of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1059534).
- We suggest "about" might be a reasonable name to associate the specialty to the place, but that this construction might be a bit over-ambitious.