Strange way of linking person to colleagues

[acka47]

While reading http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12320 I took a look at the actual data and encountered a strange way of linking a person to their colleagues. Example snippet from https://www.lib.montana.edu/people/about.json?id=139:

{
   "@id":"https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/139#person",
   "knows":{
      "@id":"https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/139#colleague",
      "@type":"Person",
      "colleague":[
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/3",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/14",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/99",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/23",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/26",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/46",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/105",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/139",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/140",
         "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/141"
      ]
   }
}

This looks like something went wrong. Why don't you just do it like this?

{
   "@id":"https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/139#person",
   "colleague":[
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/3#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/14#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/99#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/23#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/26#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/46#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/105#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/139#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/140#person",
      "https:\/\/www.lib.montana.edu\/people\/141#person"
   ]
}

Also, I am not sure whether escaping the slashes in the URIs is a good idea...

[jasonclark]

Thanks for looking at this @acka47. I was thinking I wanted to modify relationship with a verb (knows). I guess it is implied in the simple colleague array. I also wanted a URI address for the colleague data. Maybe, I'm overthinking it?

[acka47]

My understanding of the property http://schema.org/colleague is that it is used for a specific kind of knows relation. (t might even make sense to expicitely make schema:colleague a sub-property of schema:knows. Perhaps, I will ask about this over at the schemaorg repo...)

I am not sure if I understand you right about the "verb" part. colleague might also be called colleagueOf or hasColleague but a lot of schema.org aren't in verb form, other examples are schema:sibling, schema:parent, schema:email, schema:creator etc. Sometimes it helps to think of the triples describing a thing as a form with a number of keys you put values into, e.g. a form describing a person.

familyName:
givenName:
email:
telephone:
affiliation:
colleagues:
...

Why would you need a separate URI for the colleague relation? If you wanted to add information about this relation (like perhaps start and end date) this would make sense. Otherwise, I don't see why you need it to be an entity with a URI.

However, if you want to add information about a relation, you'd have to create a URI for every colleague-to-colleague relation and I don't think that the way you model this currently is the right way to go then. Perhaps you could model it with the schema:Role, although I see some problems with using Role on a bi-directional relationship.

[acka47]

BTW, schema:Role comes very handy when taking into account the coming and going of staff or their changing roles over time e.g. like so:

{
   "@vocab":"http://schema.org/",
   "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q15255419",
   "employee":{
      "@type":"OrganizationalRole",
      "startDate":"2008",
      "roleName":"Reference Librarian",
      "employee":{
         "@id":"https://www.lib.montana.edu/people/123#person",
         "name":"Hans Dampf",
         "email":"etc@org"
      }
   }
}

URIs for the library itself and its departments would make sense here too... ;-)