http://schema.org/UserInteraction inconsistency problems

[Lawrence Woodman]

I have been looking further at http://schema.org/UserInteraction and find the layout
to be very odd and was wondering what others thought?

The first problem is illustrated well with the 'interactionCount' property of
http://schema.org/Organization.  This property is specified as Text and the note gives
examples of text such as '5 UserComments', But points to http://schema.org/UserInteraction
where the examples use the format: 'UserComments: 78'.  So the plain text examples are using
different formatting. 

The second problem is that http://schema.org/UserInteraction is a vocabulary which has
various specific types such as: http://schema.org/UserComments.  But it does not seem at all
obvious which property is meant to hold the value for this.  The examples are no help as
they completely ignore that UserInteraction, et al are vocabularies and just specify plain
text examples for the 'interactionCount' property of an Article.

I think UserInteraction, would be better if it had properties for UserBlocks, UserComments, etc
This would be far more consistent with the rest of the vocabularies and would look similar in many
ways to http://schema.org/AggregateRating

Has anyone else noticed this problem or got any further insight into its current use and how it could
be improved?




-- 
vLife Systems Ltd
Registered Office: The Meridian, 4 Copthall House, Station Square, Coventry, CV1 2FL
Registered in England and Wales No. 06477649
http://vlifesystems.com

[Stéphane Corlosquet]

Hi,

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 1:30 AM, Lawrence Woodman <lwoo...@vlifesystems.com> wrote:

I have been looking further at http://schema.org/UserInteraction and find the layout
to be very odd and was wondering what others thought?

The first problem is illustrated well with the 'interactionCount' property of
http://schema.org/Organization.  This property is specified as Text and the note gives
examples of text such as '5 UserComments', But points to http://schema.org/UserInteraction
where the examples use the format: 'UserComments: 78'.  So the plain text examples are using
different formatting. 

The second problem is that http://schema.org/UserInteraction is a vocabulary which has
various specific types such as: http://schema.org/UserComments.  But it does not seem at all
obvious which property is meant to hold the value for this.  The examples are no help as
they completely ignore that UserInteraction, et al are vocabularies and just specify plain
text examples for the 'interactionCount' property of an Article.

I think UserInteraction, would be better if it had properties for UserBlocks, UserComments, etc
This would be far more consistent with the rest of the vocabularies and would look similar in many
ways to http://schema.org/AggregateRating

Has anyone else noticed this problem or got any further insight into its current use and how it could
be improved?

I agree with you Lawrence, I also find the concept of UserInteraction and the way the number of comments are defined unintuitive.

What stroke me first is the example available at http://schema.org/UserInteraction:

[[[

This article has been tweeted 1203 times and contains 78 user comments.

  <meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserTweets:1203"/>

  <meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserComments:78"/>

]]]

A couple of problems here:

1. the types UserTweets and UserComments are embedded in the content attribute with their value, so if I wanted to extract the number of comments of the article for example, I would have do extra custom processing to explode "UserComments:78", in order to get the type, and the value for that type (with no property between the two?). The extra processing required is not in line with the microdata or the RDFa specs at all. For proof, you can try this snippet at http://foolip.org/microdatajs/live/ and note that the value 1203 and 78 do not get extracted in any way.

2. Microdata and RDFa both encourage reusing the existing content of the page, so this example would be more in line with the specs by wrapping each number with a span element:

[[[

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">

  <span itemprop="name">How to Tie a Reef Knot</span>

  by <span itemprop="author">John Doe</span>

  This article has been tweeted <span itemprop="userTweets">1203</span> times and contains <span itemprop="userComments">78</span> user comments.

</div>

]]]

which allows extraction of the number of tweets and comments following the specs.

The definition of http://schema.org/UserComments is also strange: "User interaction: A comment about an item." so according to this definition, UserComments is not the number of comments as the example in UserInteraction lets us think, but rather an actual comment left by a user? That's not inline with example of UserInteraction.

Back to http://schema.org/UserInteraction, it says "A user interacting with a page", and inherits properties such as:

- attendees (the people who attended another user leaving comment?)

- performers (the people who were involved in writing the comment?)

- duration (the duration a user took to leave his comment?)

- location (the location the user was at when he left his comment?)

I'm being slightly ironic here, but my point is to show that this modeling is overly complex and not something people will implement... all what is needed here in a property to specify how many comments (or tweets, or blocks, downloads, likes, etc) a given page/article has.

My suggestion to solve the above issues would be to drop the type UserInteraction and turn the existing types UserTweets, UserComments, etc in properties belonging to a generic type like CreativeWork.

Steph.

[Lawrence Woodman]

On 21/07/11 19:03, Stéphane Corlosquet wrote:

What stroke me first is the example available at http://schema.org/UserInteraction:

[[[

This article has been tweeted 1203 times and contains 78 user comments.

  <meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserTweets:1203"/>

  <meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserComments:78"/>

]]]

A couple of problems here:

1. the types UserTweets and UserComments are embedded in the content attribute with their value, so if I wanted to extract the number of comments of the article for example, I would have do extra custom processing to explode "UserComments:78", in order to get the type, and the value for that type (with no property between the two?). The extra processing required is not in line with the microdata or the RDFa specs at all. For proof, you can try this snippet at http://foolip.org/microdatajs/live/ and note that the value 1203 and 78 do not get extracted in any way.

I agree, I can't see why this vocabulary/property has been given special treatment, otherwise you would have such silliness as instead of using Rating, having a meta content with "ratingValue: 5" or "bestRating: 10", etc

2. Microdata and RDFa both encourage reusing the existing content of the page, so this example would be more in line with the specs by wrapping each number with a span element:

[[[

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">

  <span itemprop="name">How to Tie a Reef Knot</span>

  by <span itemprop="author">John Doe</span>

  This article has been tweeted <span itemprop="userTweets">1203</span> times and contains <span itemprop="userComments">78</span> user comments.

</div>

]]]

which allows extraction of the number of tweets and comments following the specs.

This hadn't fully occurred to me at the time, but it is so true.    These details would often be displayed, so it makes sense to wrap around them, rather than keep
them separate or duplicated.

The definition of http://schema.org/UserComments is also strange: "User interaction: A comment about an item." so according to this definition, UserComments is not the number of comments as the example in UserInteraction lets us think, but rather an actual comment left by a user? That's not inline with example of UserInteraction.

Agreed, if we were to use UserComments it would look really ugly and would obviously mean that the comments would have to be on the page twice.  One visible with out the "UserComments: " prefix and one as a meta tag with the prefix!

Back to http://schema.org/UserInteraction, it says "A user interacting with a page", and inherits properties such as:

- attendees (the people who attended another user leaving comment?)

- performers (the people who were involved in writing the comment?)

- duration (the duration a user took to leave his comment?)

- location (the location the user was at when he left his comment?)

I'm being slightly ironic here, but my point is to show that this modeling is overly complex and not something people will implement... all what is needed here in a property to specify how many comments (or tweets, or blocks, downloads, likes, etc) a given page/article has.

I agree it is just too unclear and makes no obvious sense.

My suggestion to solve the above issues would be to drop the type UserInteraction and turn the existing types UserTweets, UserComments, etc in properties belonging to a generic type like CreativeWork.

The only problem with this is that it is not just CreativeWorks that have interactionCounts (UserInteraction); I noticed that Organization also does.  So I still think it would be better to have UserInteraction as a vocabulary, but have each property specified explicitly, rather than as text that has to be parsed further.

[Nick Balestra]

Why user comments, ... doesn't have an author? Seems so weird to me
and agree with you all that is so strange that everything related to
user interaction is under events.

Hoe i'm trying to solve this (but is not a perfect solution) :

I've something like comment stream (a la fb) i'll wrap up all this
section under userInteraction. then each post will be a user comment
(with description = text of the comment itself) and with name and
avatar from a nested Person object.

How you dealing with such scenarios?

....all this user interaction need a lot to be fixed, especially in
this social era.

cheers, Nick

On Jul 21, 8:03 pm, Stéphane Corlosquet <scorlosq...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>

> On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 1:30 AM, Lawrence Woodman <lwood...@vlifesystems.com
>
> > wrote:
> > **
> > I have been looking further athttp://schema.org/UserInteractionand find

> > the layout
> > to be very odd and was wondering what others thought?
>
> > The first problem is illustrated well with the 'interactionCount' property
> > of
> >http://schema.org/Organization.  This property is specified as Text and
> > the note gives
> > examples of text such as '5 UserComments', But points tohttp://schema.org
> > /UserInteraction
> > where the examples use the format: 'UserComments: 78'.  So the plain text
> > examples are using
> > different formatting.
>

> > The second problem is thathttp://schema.org/UserInteractionis a

> > vocabulary which has
> > various specific types such as:http://schema.org/UserComments.  But it
> > does not seem at all
> > obvious which property is meant to hold the value for this.  The examples
> > are no help as
> > they completely ignore that UserInteraction, et al are vocabularies and
> > just specify plain
> > text examples for the 'interactionCount' property of an Article.
>
> > I think UserInteraction, would be better if it had properties for
> > UserBlocks, UserComments, etc
> > This would be far more consistent with the rest of the vocabularies and
> > would look similar in many

> > ways tohttp://schema.org/AggregateRating

>
> > Has anyone else noticed this problem or got any further insight into its
> > current use and how it could
> > be improved?
>
> I agree with you Lawrence, I also find the concept of UserInteraction and
> the way the number of comments are defined unintuitive.
>

> What stroke me first is the example available athttp://schema.org/UserInteraction:

>
> [[[
> This article has been tweeted 1203 times and contains 78 user comments.
>   <meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserTweets:1203"/>
>   <meta itemprop="interactionCount" content="UserComments:78"/>
> ]]]
>
> A couple of problems here:
>
> 1. the types UserTweets and UserComments are embedded in the content
> attribute with their value, so if I wanted to extract the number of comments
> of the article for example, I would have do extra custom processing to
> explode "UserComments:78", in order to get the type, and the value for that
> type (with no property between the two?). The extra processing required is
> not in line with the microdata or the RDFa specs at all. For proof, you can

> try this snippet athttp://foolip.org/microdatajs/live/and note that the

> value 1203 and 78 do not get extracted in any way.
>
> 2. Microdata and RDFa both encourage reusing the existing content of the
> page, so this example would be more in line with the specs by wrapping each
> number with a span element:
> [[[
> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
>   <span itemprop="name">How to Tie a Reef Knot</span>
>   by <span itemprop="author">John Doe</span>
>   This article has been tweeted <span itemprop="userTweets">1203</span>
> times and contains <span itemprop="userComments">78</span> user comments.
> </div>
> ]]]
> which allows extraction of the number of tweets and comments following the
> specs.
>

> The definition ofhttp://schema.org/UserCommentsis also strange: "User

> interaction: A comment about an item." so according to this
> definition, UserComments is not the number of comments as the example in
> UserInteraction lets us think, but rather an actual comment left by a user?
> That's not inline with example of UserInteraction.
>

> Back tohttp://schema.org/UserInteraction, it says "A user interacting with

[Lawrence Woodman]

On 23/08/11 00:18, Nick Balestra wrote:
> Why user comments, ... doesn't have an author? Seems so weird to me
> and agree with you all that is so strange that everything related to
> user interaction is under events.
>
> Hoe i'm trying to solve this (but is not a perfect solution) :
>
> I've something like comment stream (a la fb) i'll wrap up all this
> section under userInteraction. then each post will be a user comment
> (with description = text of the comment itself) and with name and
> avatar from a nested Person object.
>
> How you dealing with such scenarios?

I'm classing userInteraction as defunct until it is sorted out properly.
There are too many inconsistencies and problems with it, to take it
seriously. Until this is ironed out, I can't see how it would add
any semantic value to make use of it.

> ....all this user interaction need a lot to be fixed, especially in
> this social era.

I agree, you would have thought that with social media being so important,
more thought would have been put into this.

Lawrence

[Mathias Roth]

But how to distinguish, relate and subordinate blog comments from / to blog posts then?

[Lawrence Woodman]

On 03/09/11 09:24, Mathias Roth wrote:
> But how to distinguish, relate and subordinate blog comments from / to
> blog posts then?

As it stands I don't see it as a huge problem. At the moment I just
wrap each blog post in
http://schema.org/BlogPosting, and leave the comments unwrapped.

For example:

<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">
This is the article text

Here is the end of the post
</article>

<div id="coments">
<ul>
<li>I am a comment</li>
<li>So am I</li>
</ul>
</div>

The post itself should be given precedence over the comments because it
has added semantic
value through the semantic tags and microdata. They post is easily
distinguished from the rest of
the content for the same reason. The main problem is showing that they
are related, and this is
the main failing at the moment. Something I hope and feel sure will be
sorted out in the next
version of the schemas

[Mathias Roth]

Thanks for answering, Lawrence

Means that Schema.org is considering HTML5 tags ... this was another question of mine.