Describe the funding of a person/project/creative work

[hubgit]

A schema (funder name, funder identifier, award number) for describing the funding of academic research and journal articles is published as part of FundRef.

It would be useful to have something similar - and more broadly applicable - in schema.org, to describe the funding of various things.

As an example:

• A CreativeWork would have one or more funding, the value of which is a Funding.
• A Funding would have one or more funder, the value of which is one or more Organisation or Person.
• A Funding would have zero or more awardNumber, the value of which is text (e.g. an NIH grant number).
• A Funding would have zero or more startDate and endDate.

To consider:

• Should the funding property be attached to the CreativeWork, the project, or each Person/contributor?
• When attached to a Person, should this include professional awards, such as fellowships, or employers?

[chaals]

The best example I can think of for noting people being funded are politicians, but there are certainly cases of both projects, and creative works they produce, being funded and wanting to acknowledge that funding.

[chaals]

For schema.org's purposes, if we do this I would be inclined to keep it pretty generic - i.e. Thing could have a funder (by the time we allow for organisations, people, documents, sculptures, projects and so on, I'm not sure what we gain by trying to think of the things that cannot be funded…

[thadguidry]

@hubgit Your ideas are similar to mine in the past: https://www.freebase.com/user/thadguidry/default_domain/grant_program?schema=

here's my past playground, you might find some interesting types and properties to explore:
https://www.freebase.com/user/thadguidry/default_domain

So I suggest that Grants be an extension of Schema.org and try to make it as generic as possible starting out. It seems as if your data is aligned with a list of Grants. So I would start with a basic Grant type that anyone at any organization could use (USA, Europe, etc). After that then you can see the abstractions needed, and perhaps then create a higher type if needed for Fund (where a project can be funded by a Grant, or Online Funding Campaign, i.e. Kickstarter, Backme, etc., or Investment and then create those other types as well, if need be... OnlineCampaign, Investment, etc...)

Best of luck.

[hubgit]

I wonder if the existing PayAction would be appropriate (perhaps with an inverse property).

[rvguha]

I would strongly prefer to stay away from putting everything on Thing.

Lets start with CreativeWork and Project (or something like that). We can
then proceed from there.

guha

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 3:52 AM, chaals notifications@github.com wrote:

For schema.org's purposes, if we do this I would be inclined to keep it
pretty generic - i.e. Thing could have a funder (by the time we allow for
organisations, people, documents, sculptures, projects and so on, I'm not
sure what we gain by trying to think of the things that cannot be funded…

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#383 (comment).

[rvguha]

In keeping with our desired naming convention, let us not have both Funding
and funding. Lets come up with different terms.

Further, the term 'Funding' is a bit too generic. Lets use something more
descriptive

guha

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 7:05 AM, Alf Eaton notifications@github.com wrote:

A schema (funder name, funder identifier, award number) for describing the
funding of academic research and journal articles is published as part of
FundRef http://help.crossref.org/fundref.

It would be useful to have something similar - and more broadly applicable

• in schema.org, to describe the funding of various things.

As an example:

• A ScholarlyArticle would have one or more funding, the value of
  which is a Funding.
• A Funding would have one or more funder, the value of which is one
  or more Organisation or Person.
• A Funding would have zero or more awardNumber, the value of which is
  text (e.g. an NIH grant number
  http://era.nih.gov/commons/commons-help/198.htm).

To consider:

• Should the funding property be attached to the CreativeWork, the
  project, or each Person/contributor?
• When attached to a Person, should this include professional awards,
  such as fellowships, or employers?

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#383.

[rvguha]

Yes. There is a whole domain around 'grants', which should cover all the
use cases you mention. Including some additional ones like donations. There
is quite a bit of interest in getting this kind of data made public
(especially the donation case).

guha

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Thad Guidry notifications@github.com
wrote:

@hubgit https://github.com/hubgit Your ideas are similar to mine in the
past:
https://www.freebase.com/user/thadguidry/default_domain/grant_program?schema=

here's my past playground, you might find some interesting types and
properties to explore:
https://www.freebase.com/user/thadguidry/default_domain

So I suggest that Grants be an extension of Schema.org and try to make it
as generic as possible starting out. It seems as if your data is aligned
with a list of Grants. So I would start with a basic Grant type that anyone
at any organization could use (USA, Europe, etc). After that then you can
see the abstractions needed, and perhaps then create a higher type if
needed for Fund (where a project can be funded by a Grant, or Online
Funding Campaign, i.e. Kickstarter, Backme, etc., or Investment and then
create those other types as well, if need be... OnlineCampaign, Investment,
etc...)

Best of luck.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#383 (comment).

[hubgit]

Exploring some terms (deliberately broad, to try to include all the possiblities):

• grant
• payment / Pay (agent, recipient, description, amount, start + end date)
• sponsor (in some fields implies "guarantor")
• backer
• funder / fund
• contributor (using Role)

Properties needed (see PayAction):

• donor/giver (agent)
• recipient
• start ± end date
• purpose / assistance type
• amount + currency (price)
• description
• award id / program number (local identifier)
• id (global identifier)
• program (larger body that the grant is part of)
• other roles (administrator, institution, etc)

[hubgit]

An experiment at giving grant donors a "contributor" role on the work:

[http://example.org/works/1]:
  type: CreativeWork
  contributor:
    - type: FundingRole
      roleName: "donor" # could be "sponsor", "backer", etc
      contributor:
        - type: Organization
          name: "Medical Research Council"
      award:
        - type: Grant
          awardId: "MRC123"
          startDate: 2014-01-01
          endDate: 2015-01-01
          recipient:
            - type: Person
              name: "Bob Smith"

In this example, FundingRole has an extra award property, which is a Grant, which has similar properties to a PayAction.

[hubgit]

An experiment at attaching the grant (with properties copied from PayAction) directly to the work:

[http://example.org/works/1]:
  type: CreativeWork
  funding:
    - type: Grant      
      awardId: "MRC123"
      startDate: 2014-01-01
      endDate: 2015-01-01
      agent:
        - type: Organization
          name: "Medical Research Council"
      recipient:
        - type: Person
          name: "Bob Smith"

[hubgit]

Question: Is Grant a generic enough name to cover all of the following (and more)?:

• Kickstarter backing
• Donations to a political party
• Research funding by a charity
• Sponsorship by a commercial organisation
• Charitable donations
• Venture capital
• Film production companies/record labels paying for production of a movie/album.
• Employer contributions to an employee's work on an open-source project.

[hubgit]

An experiment at using PayAction to attach a Grant to a CreativeWork (following the example of potentialAction => AssessAction => resultReview => Review => itemReviewed => CreativeWork):

[http://example.org/works/1]:
  type: CreativeWork
  potentialAction:
    - type: PayAction
  funding:
    - type: Grant
      url: http://example.org/grants/1

[http://example.org/payments/1]:
  type: PayAction
  startDate: 2014-01-01
  endDate: 2015-01-01
  agent:
    - type: Organization
      name: "Medical Research Council"
  recipient:
    - type: Person
      name: "Bob Smith"
  resultGrant:
    - type: Grant
      url: http://example.org/grants/1
      awardId: "MRC123"
      itemFunded:
        - type: CreativeWork
          url: http://example.org/works/1

I quite like this example, except that there's no way of getting from the Grant to the agent and recipient. It seems like the properties of the grant should actually be properties of the PayAction (perhaps as a GrantAction), but then there's no Grant object to use in the reverse direction…

[sballesteros]

Another experiment leveraging sponsor and assuming that it would be reasonable to bump the domain of sponsor from MedicalStudy to CreativeWork:

{
  "@type": "ScholarlyArticle",
  "sponsor": { // bump domain to CreativeWork
    "@type": "SponsorRole", //subclass of schema:Role
    "sponsor": {
      "@type": "Organization"
    },
    "roleOffer": {
      "@type": "FundingSource", // subclass of schema:Offer
      "serialNumber": "grantId"
    },
    "startDate": "2015-01-01"
  }
}

[darobin]

FWIW we use the experiment that @sballesteros describes over at http://scholarly.vernacular.io/#funding.