What properties best define Topic > Sub-topic > Specialty

[Rob Koberg]

An example of this is at: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/

What properties would you use to assign values similar to the above Topic > Sub-topic > Specialty hierarchical select? Are they simply keywords or is there a better way to define a CreativeResource's subject area?

[Phil Barker]

Hello Rob, you can use the about property of a schema.org CreativeWork to give the subject of a resource.

I think that representing the hierarchy of topics is out of scope for LRMI, and even for schema.org as a whole. As I understand it both LRMI and schema.org are about describing resources on the web and not much about representing knowledge structures. So while we might use LRMI/schema.org say a resource is about physics / quantum mechanics / Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and we could even go as far as including a representation and description of each of those topics as an intangible thing, I wouldn't try to use schema.org to describe the relationships between those concepts. If that is what you want to do and if you want to do it in a linked data / semantic web way, then you are best looking at SKOS http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

That leaves the question of what to put into the about property: do you put just the speciality and leave system to infer the broader topics from the speciality/topic relationships held elsewhere, or do you explicitly say that a the resource is about each of them by repeating the about property, or about about all of them by having one about property with all three topics in? That's a judgement call, my feeling is that the first approach is more sophisticated and better for local use, that the second might be better for making sure other people get as much information as possible (they might not have access to your representation of topic relationships), and that the third should be avoided.

Phil

On 09/05/13 14:59, Rob Koberg wrote:

An example of this is at: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/

What properties would you use to assign values similar to the above Topic > Sub-topic > Specialty hierarchical select? Are they simply keywords or is there a better way to define a CreativeResource's subject area?

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[Peter Pinch]

On May 10, 2013, at 5:44 AM, Phil Barker wrote:

Hello Rob, you can use the about property of a schema.org CreativeWork to give the subject of a resource.

In fact, that is what we did (or intended to do) on the MIT OpenCourseWare site. On the individual course pages, those topics are reflected in the "about" property. 

For example, see http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear-engineering/22-812j-managing-nuclear-technology-spring-2004/index.htm lines 34-40

(Unfortunately, I didn't get the HTML quite right, so most schema.org parsers would miss it. It's on the fix list, but hasn't made it to the top yet.) 

The thought crossed my mind that if you really wanted to preserve the hierarchy, you could do something with alignmentObject, but we don't intend our course topics to be so authoritative. Treating them as subjects is just fine. 

Personally, something I've tried to keep in mind is that the use case for schema.org is public search engines. It may not be a complete or ideal representation of the object, but it really only needs to be good enough for discovery. 

- Peter Pinch

Peter Pinch |  Production Manager, OpenCourseWare

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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[Rob Koberg]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I actually did this yesterday (the
schema.org module for drupal makes it easy and I assuming it is
correct at this point). You can see it if you view source at:

http://mash.pearsonfoundation-web.org/groups/all-about-monkeys/example-lrmi-enhanced-creative-resource

That works fine. I can use it hierarchically internal to the site.