How to do a new extension with Schema.org + Microdata? - schema.org

I have seen in a post that the slash is no longer up to date for creating new extensions in Schema.org.
I am using Microdata and would prefer to stick to it across my site.
What is the new way to create a new extension?
For example I want to create a new extension for MedicalTourism under the category Travel Agency. Before it would have been
http://schema.org/TravelAgency/MedicalTourism
What is the new way?
And what would the code look like?

You may still use Schema.org’s "slash-based" extension mechanism. It’s "outdated", but not invalid.
But it’s not (and never was) a good idea to use this mechanism if you want other consumers to understand or make special use of your extensions.
In some cases you could use Schema.org’s Role type, which allows you to give some additional data about a property, but not about types.
Alternatives
Propose new types/properties: If they are useful and the sponsors agree, they might get added to the Schema.org vocabulary at some point.
Use an existing vocabulary that defines types/properties for your use case (or create a new vocabulary if you don’t find one):
Either instead of Schema.org,
or in addition to Schema.org (while this works nicely with RDFa, Microdata is pretty limited: you’d have to use Schema.org’s additionalType property for additional types and full URIs for additional properties).

Related

Offers is not included as a property of thing on Schema.org

I am reading up on Schema.org to be able to add the markup to a website I am working on. However, I'm already running into something I don't understand.
In the example for Product, it shows you should have a div whose itemprop is of type offers, but in the Product definition at http://schema.org/Product, I don't see offers as a property of Product at all.
If you look at http://schema.org/offers, it says offers is a property of Thing, but I don't see offers listed as a property of Thing at http://schema.org/Thing. What am I misunderstanding here?
Product does define the offers property. If you don’t see the offers property in the first table on that page (under the table heading "Properties from Product"), you are probably affected by a (known) bug. It typically works again when reloading the page later.
offers doesn’t have Thing as domain (but: AggregateOffer, CreativeWork, Event, MenuItem, Product, Service, Trip). If you are referring to the line "Thing > Property > offers", it doesn’t mean that the offers property is defined for/at Thing, it means that the offers property is a Thing. You can ignore that detail. What matters is the domain ("Used on these types") and the range ("Values expected to be one of these types") of a property.
It's perhaps worth highlighting the distinction between "types" and "properties". The vocabulary is a hierarchical taxonomy of the tangible and intangible things around us, which it calls types. In microdata, these use the itemtype attribute.
Properties describe the attributes of and relationships between the types, and in microdata use the itemprop attribute.
So, the type Product has the property offers (it's definitely there, you must be missing it1). A product can offer various things, one of which is the possibility of having some right to own or use it, which is described by the type Offer.
The property offers is indeed a property of Thing, but Thing is at the very top of the taxonomy, i.e. everything the ontology describes is a "thing", tangible or otherwise. So Thing is then broken down into more specific types of things:
Thing
- Intangible
-- Offer
-- Property
--- offers
So offers is a Thing like you and I are things — it's true, but we could be a lot more specific. In this case, offers is a property of the type Property, which in turn is a a more specific type of Intangible, which is a Thing.
1 Image of "offers" property under /Product:

The difference between isPartOf and hasPart in Schema.org?

What is the difference between the Schema.org properties isPartOf and hasPart and when to use the one instead of the other?
As noted on their pages, they are inverse properties.
As an example, let’s take a webpage that is part of a website. You could then state one of these:
WebSite hasPart WebPage
WebPage isPartOf WebSite
It doesn’t matter which one you choose. (But there might of course be consumers that only recognize one of these properties.)
Note: Most of the time, Schema.org doesn’t define an inverse equivalent for a property. For example, there is author, but no authorOf. This is because you can use every property for both directions, with the help of the syntax:
RDFa:
rev
(example)
Microdata:
itemprop-reverse (non-standard, which is one of the reasons to prefer RDFa over Microdata)
(example)
JSON-LD:
#reverse
(example)

Difference between WebPage and Article - Schema.org

As there are a limited number of options available in Schema.org, I wonder whats the best schema to use when it doesn't fit into the other categories. For example if I'm writing about a Car (assuming there is no car schema as I've not seen one) then should I use the Article or WebPage schemas?
Official documentation suggests three options:
If you publish content of an unsupported type, you have three options:
Do nothing (don't mark up the content in any way). However, before you decide to do this, check to see if any of the types supported by schema.org - such as reviews, comments, images, or breadcrumbs - are relevant.
Use a less-specific markup type. For example, schema.org has no "Professor" type. However, if you have a directory of professors in your university department, you could use the "person" type to mark up the information for every professor in the directory.
If you are feeling ambitious, use the schema.org extension system to define a new type.
Also if you do not declare explicitly the type of a web page it is considered to be of http://schema.org/WebPage, that is the most general type that you can use in this case.
Quote source
(Schema.org has a type for cars, Car, which is a Product. I’m using a parrot as example in this answer.)
You might want to differentiate between the thing the page is about and the page.
You can mark up your page with WebPage, but that doesn’t convey what the page is about / what it contains. To denote that, you need another item that can be used as value for the about / mainEntity property.
If Schema.org doesn’t offer a specific type, go up in the type hierarchy. There’s always a type that works: Thing. Or in other words: start at Thing and go down until you find the most specific type. See my answer on Webmasters SE with more details.
So a page (WebPage) about a specific parrot (Thing) could be marked up like this:
<body typeof="schema:WebPage">
<article property="schema:mainEntity" typeof="schema:Thing">
</article>
</body>
And if possible, it can be a good idea to use suitable specific types from other vocabularies (e.g., from animal or even parrot ontologies) in addition to the Schema.org types. For example, you could use the Parrot type from DBpedia:
<body typeof="schema:WebPage" prefix="dbpedia: http://dbpedia.org/resource/">
<article property="schema:about" typeof="schema:Thing dbpedia:Parrot">
</article>
</body>

Has anyone implement DITA 1.2 Subject scheme in their work?

I would like to know if there is anyone who has implemented the subjectscheme maps of DITA1.2 in their work? If yes, can you please break-up the example to show:
how to do it?
when not to use it?
I am aware of the theory behind it, but I am yet to implement the same and I wanted to know if there are things I must keep in mind during the planning and implementation phase.
An example is here:
How to use DITA subjectSchemes?
The DITA 1.2 spec also has a good example (3.1.5.1.1).
What you can currently do with subject scheme maps is:
define a taxonomy
bind the taxonomy to a profiling or flagging attribute, so that it the attribute only takes a value that you have defined
filter or flag elements that have a defined value with a DITAVAL file.
Advantage 1: Since you have a taxonomy, filtering a parent value also filters its children, which is convenient.
Advantage 2: You can fully define and thus control the list of values, which prevents tag bloat.
Advantage 3: You can reuse the subject scheme map in many topic maps, in the usual modular DITA way, so you can apply the same taxonomies anywhere.
These appear to be the main uses for a subject scheme map at present.
The only disadvantages I have found is that I can think of other hypothetical uses for subject scheme maps such as faceted browsing, but I don't think any implementation exists. The DITA-OT doesn't have anything like that yet anyway.

CMFWorkflow and Marker Interfaces

I'm currently prototyping a small project in Plone and trying to KISS as much as possible while the requirements are still in flux. To that end, I've resisted creating any custom content types for now and have been using marker interfaces to distinguish between "types" of content.
Now that I'm looking at workflow, I've realised that they're bound to types, and there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for assigning them to markers. I think I could wrap portal_workflow with my own version that looks for markers and returns the appropriate workflow if found, however, this doesn't feel like a tenable approach.
Is there a way of assigning workflow to markers that I've missed, or should I just bite the bullet and create some lightweight custom content types instead?
There's not really a built-in feature to use markers, but at http://www.martinaspeli.net/articles/dcworkflows-hidden-gems, Martin Aspeli hints that it is possible:
Note that in Plone, the workflow chain of an object is looked up by
multi-adapting the object and the workflow to the IWorkflowChain
interface. The adapter factory should return a tuple of string
workflow names (IWorkflowChain is a specialisation of IReadSequence,
i.e. a tuple). The default obviously looks at the mappings in the
portal_workflow tool, but it is possible to override the mapping, e.g.
in resopnse to some marker interface.