Can text based properties be coerced to typed entities?

[Tony McCreath]

I'm testing my new validator and I found a case that I can't find a way to formally validate.

Here is a scenario that validates in the SDTT:

In the code, founder is a string. However, founder is defined to be of type Person, so specifying it as text would be invalid? That's what my tool says:

But the SDTT converts the text into a Person with a name. Making it look valid.

Is that following any official rules, or is it just Google helping people who get it wrong?

I checked the schema.org context file and it did not specify anything special for the founder property.

[Richard Wallis]

Hi Tony,

There are two things in play here:

1.  Schema,org is 'forgiving' in its interpretation of expected types for properties.  As described in the Schema.org Data Model documentation:
   ... We also expect that often, where we expect a property value of type Person, Place, Organization or some other subClassOf Thing, we will get a text string, even if our schemas don't formally document that expectation. In the spirit of "some data is better than none", search engines will often accept this markup and do the best we can. Similarly, some types such as Role and URL can be used with all properties...
   The simple effect being that, in addition to the documented expected types, many well also accept either a Text, Url, or Role as a value for any property and interpret it as best as possible.
   
   
2. Building on the above, a consumer (such as the SDTT) finding a Text value for a property expecting a Person may well interpret it as a reference to a 'Person' using the Text value for the name property - as you observe,

Note that the exact interpretation of this is in the hands of individual data consumers.  The behavior you observe using the SDTT, is however fairly common.

Hope that helps.

~Richard

Richard Wallis

Founder, Data Liberate

http://dataliberate.com

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis

Twitter: @rjw

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[Tony McCreath]

Great info, 

I think I may have my tool do a warning and an explanation in cases where it's text that can be coerced into an entity. 

I'd like my tool to push people in the right direction.