How should funding or grant metadata be supported in schema.org?

There is no obvious way to identify a grant support. (see earlier thread #137). In this issue we would like to promote discussion that could find consensus around proposing an Award @type or similar mechanism to http://schema.org to better support this.

@mfenner has suggested the following structure:

"funding": {
  "@type": "Award",
  "identifier": "654039",
  "funder": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "@id": "https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000780",
    "name": "European Commission"
}

(Note that CodeMeta already introduces the funding property to SoftwareSourceCode class, but it is not a schema.org property at this time).

In the above proposal, if I understand correctly, Martin is suggesting that http://schema.org/funding would become a new property of CreativeWork types (at least of ScholarlyArticle, SoftwareSourceCode, Dataset and other academic products that inherit from CreativeWork), and that Award would be a new Type/Class that would also inherit from CreativeWork. Note that funder is already a property of a CreativeWork, so that part would come ‘for free’ with creation of an Award refinement of that type.

Note that this has some potential for confusion with an existing schema.org property, award, http://schema.org/award, which simply takes Text strings as it’s data type (and refers to “awards” won by the CreativeWork, semantically a rather different idea than the funding support of the project.

Let’s hash out some good ideas here and once we have a solid proposal we can open an issue at https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg and see what they think.

cc @sckott @arfon @danielskatz @mbjones @gothub and anyone else who we can get to weigh in here!

[mfenner]

@cboettig I propose that we use Award instead of Grant, as it is more generic (FundRef came to the same conclusion, see Nobel Prize below as example). And to make Award an intangible. The property award should then allow type Award in addition to type text, so the semantics are complementary rather than conflicting. Look at comment/Comment for an example of how this is done elsewhere in schema.org.

Instead of

{ 
  "award": "Nobel Prize in Physics 2017"
}

We would do

{ 
  "award": {
     "@type": "Award",
     "name": "Nobel Prize in Physics 2017"
}

And we can then extend this with additional properties (see below), in particular funder.

As for additional properties, I agree that we need some flexibility. A lot comes free if Award is a sub-class of Thing, e.g.

• name
• alternateName
• description
• identifier
• url

I suggest we also include the following from Event:

• startDate
• endDate
• duration
• funder
• sponsor
• review

I would also be fine including the existing property amount, and maybe a few more.

The example from @cboettig would then only need a name change from Award to Grant.

{
        "@type": "Award",
        "name": "The rOpenSci Project",
        "startDate": "2015-11-01",
        "endDate": "2018-10-31",
        "funder": {
          "@id": "https://doi.org/10.13039/100007028",
          "@type": "Organization",
          "name": "Helmsley Charitable Trust"
        },
        "amount": { 
          "@type": "MonetaryAmount", 
          "value": "2900000", 
          "currency":  "USD" 
        }
  }

My example (as part of the description of a creative work) would look like this:

{ 
  "award: [
     {
        "@type": "Award",
        "name": "MOTivational strength of ecosystem services and alternative ways to express the value of BIOdiversity",
        "identifier": "282625",
        "url": "http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/100180_en.html",
        "funder": {
          "@id": "http://doi.org/10.13039/501100000780",
          "@type": "Organization",
          "name": "European Commission"
        }
    },
    {
        "@type": "Award",
        "name": "Institutionalizing global genetic-resource commons. Global Strategies for accessing and using essential public knowledge assets in the life science",
        "identifier": "284382",
        "url": "http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/100603_en.html",
        "funder": {
          "@id": "http://doi.org/10.13039/501100000780",
          "@type": "Organization",
          "name": "European Commission"
        }
    }]
}

[mfenner]

Also relevant to this: the RDA Software Source Code Identification Working Group started at the Research Data Alliance Plenary last week: https://rd-alliance.org/groups/software-source-code-identification-wg. The co-chairs of that group are all big codemeta fans.

Also, there was a BoF to consolidate the activities around schema.org for scholarly content, which hopefully turns into a working group: https://www.rd-alliance.org/bof-using-schemaorg-and-enriched-metadata-enableboost-fairness-research-resources-rda-13th-plenary

It might be worth exploring the synergies, to for example over time bring the extra terms needed into schema.org in one way or another.