Schema.org Support for Bibliographic Relationships and Periodicals

[Guest post by Richard Wallis, OCLC & Dan Scott, Laurentian University]
With the addition of three new types, the latest version of schema.org introduces support for describing the relationship between, Articles and the Periodicals in which they were published, along with potentially related PublicationIssues & PublicationVolumes. For example:

• The article "The semantic web" was published in May 2001, in volume 284, issue 5 of Scientific american on pages 28 through 37.
• That issue of Scientific American contained 33 other articles listed at http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v284/n5/index.html.
• The editors for that issue included Mark Alpert, Steve Ashley, and Carol Ezzell.

You can now also describe creative works that span multiple parts using the hasPart and isPartOf properties, and you can express relationships between a conceptual representation of a creative work and physical examples of that work using the exampleOfWork and workExample properties. For example:

• The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy consisting of three separate books.
• One edition of the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published by HarperCollins in 1974 with ISBN .
• Another edition of the first book was published by Ballantine Books in 1984 with ISBN 0345296052.
• The movie J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi and released in 1978, was based on the first book in the trilogy.
• The movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson and released in 2001, was also based on the first book in the trilogy.

These extensions were developed by the W3C Schema Bib Extend Community Group, and were designed in the spirit of schema.org to provide an easily published and widely consumable vocabulary for creative works. Many other modelling and vocabulary initiatives, such as RDA and BIBFRAME, continue to work towards offering the additional layers of granularity of description desired by many in the bibliographic metadata world, and these schema.org extensions hope to complement those efforts. Where possible, we aligned our work with the Bibliographic Ontology, and acknowledge their leadership in tackling many of these issues.

We are pleased with the outcome of working with the broader W3C Web Schemas Task Force community to refine these extensions, which also helped address similar concepts and relationships required by a number of associated domains such as TV, Radio and Music Recording. One outcome of this discussion was the elevation of position to a general superproperty of properties such as issueNumber, volumeNumber, seasonNumber, and episodeNumber. Combined with the recent addition of the Role type, schema.org now has the flexible, generic framework to address the specialized needs of other domains such as Comics.

We welcome the acceptance, refinement and introduction of these proposals by schema.org, which greatly enhances the capability for describing creative works in general, and bibliographic resources in particular.