Improved schema for social media

[vickitardif]

Schema.org has limited support for marking up social media content. The existing schema includes http://schema.org/BlogPosting, but does not reflect the expanding nature of the industry. Today people, tweet, pin, liveblog, etc.

This is a big area, which cannot be covered by a single proposal. I am proposing some modest changes to start us down the path.

1. Create a new type SocialMediaPosting as child of Article. Tweets, pins, facebook posts, instagram posts, etc. are all included in this type.
2. Move BlogPosting to be a child of SocialMediaPosting instead of directly under Article.
3. Create a LiveBlogPosting type as a subtype of BlogPosting to cover live blogging. LiveBlogPosting has the following properties:
   • coverageStartTime: When coverage is scheduled to begin. This may be before the start time for the event being covered.
   • coverageEndTime: When coverage is scheduled to conclude. This may be after the event ends.
   • liveBlogUpdate: An individual update to the blog posting.
4. Create DiscussionForumPosting as a subtype of SocialMediaPosting for discussion boards like Reddit, etc.

See my commit at vickitardif@5e56cb3 for details including some initial examples.

[vickitardif]

I expanded the examples to include microdata and RDFa. See pull request #549.

[chaals]

WfM

[akuckartz]

/cc @elf-pavlik

[elf-pavlik]

@johnbreslin and @parklize working on SIOC recently also joined W3C Social WG. Maybe we could take a look all together how schema:DiscussionForumPosting and schema:SocialMediaPosting can stay in alignment with existing SIOC terms?
I think also l schema:Question & schema:Answer / schema:AskAction & schema:ReplyAction fit into Social.

[danbri]

@elf-pavlik do you see any reason this couldn't be handled by adding something like 'equivalent class' links between the proposed schema.org terms and SIOC? /cc @scor who was also involved in SIOC.

[parklize]

This might help @elf-pavlik
The mappings between schema.org and other Web data vocabularies created when schema.org was launched. (Including SIOC mappings)
http://schema.rdfs.org/mappings.html

[danbri]

Thanks @parklize!

For SIOC, the 2011 mappings were:

## Classes
schema:BlogPosting owl:equivalentClass sioct:BlogPost .
schema:Blog owl:equivalentClass sioct:Blog .
schema:Article rdfs:subClassOf sioc:Item .
schema:WebPage rdfs:subClassOf sioc:Item .

## Properties (some are not from SIOC, but used simultaneously with SIOC data)
schema:author owl:equivalentProperty foaf:maker .
schema:about owl:equivalentProperty sioc:about .
schema:datePublished owl:equivalentProperty dct:created .
schema:articleBody owl:equivalentProperty sioc:content .
schema:articleSection rdfs:subPropertyOf sioc:topic .
schema:blogPosts rdfs:subPropertyOf sioc:container_of .
# sioc:num_replies rdfs:subPropertyOf schema:interactionCount .

[elf-pavlik]

Thinking about schema.org relaxed model - (domain|range)Includes and convenient Text objects. How do you see, something like using sub(Class|Property)Of in reverse direction?

sioc:Item rdfs:subClassOf schema:Article  .
sioc:Item rdfs:subClassOf schema:WebPage .

sioc:topic rdfs:subPropertyOf schema:articleSection .
sioc:container_of rdfs:subPropertyOf schema:blogPosts .

I remember few IRL discussions with @bblfish and @timbl during W3C Social: F2F3 in Paris, where we looked at schema.org relaxed terms as super of those which ontologies like FOAF, SIOC, CCO, ... define in more strict way.

[inetbiz]

@vholland live blog posting should be an event type. Schema.org already has socialevent. I can think of two examples in the wild already. Youtube Live Events Chat and Google+ Live Events chat stream is live blogging.

[elf-pavlik]

I find it interesting that G+ doesn't really seem to use schema.org in a consistent way

Yes

• https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/moment-types/
• https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/article-rendering

No

• https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people
• https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/comments

Interestingly last two look like ActivityStreams 1 (verb, displayName, objectType) @jasnell @samuelgoto

@vholland regarding #514 I also noticed in people and comments examples: circledByCount, plusOneCount, plusoners.totalItems - different of counting +1 for people and comments reminds me of InteractionCounter vs. Collection.totalItems discussed in #137

seeAlso: w3c/activitystreams#89