Reopening a discussion on representing user accounts

[rrlevering]

At Google we are starting to release more guidelines for conveying creator/author/person information but the lack of a type for account makes the markup awkward.

There has been previous discussion for something like a user account or social profile account or whatever we want to scope it (see #267). There is no representation AFAIK for something like that in schema.org. Representationally this leads to problems figuring out how to represent domain-specific information that is separate from the real-world person that the account/profile represents. Some examples:

• How do we represent when a profile was created? That's not when the person was created. At Google we are recommending hanging that on a ProfilePage node (so the page implicitly is created when the account is created) but that is not ideal.
• Naming is confusing distinguishing between a system handle and a real world name. There is little specification for whether name (or alternateName) represents the canonical representation of the thing in its system context or something more objective.
• Ambiguity in entity type. Some systems cannot tell whether something is a Person or Organization and yet many of our author properties have to use a specific type to be valid.

[WeaverStever]

I wrote (seems to be gone now) about creating a specification where creatives could publish their various taxonomy folksonomy handles and hashtags (content / discussion threads) on their website schema.

In the structured data, the handle or hashtag would be need to be paired with the social media domain name, creating a site-search from there would be pretty simple.

{
  "name" : "@parTEE",
  "domain": "jagermeister.com",
  "discussionThreads": ["#allNightLong", "#sloHungover", "#holdMyBeer"]
}

I guess the publisher could also declare if they are a person, organization, musicalgroup etc., as this would help with the disambiguation.

[danbri]

I'd support adding something for this. In ancient history we had a FOAF type OnlineAccount for this. It was kind of verbose instead of using URLs for the associated profile pages (like XFN used). But as you say it has value. There is also a proposal to add a 'pronouns' property in #3272 which would attach the info to a Person. It might in some cases be more useful to associate with per-site accounts, as could things like one-line-bios / about me text fields...?

[rrlevering]

The structure I'm seeing in my head looks like:

{
   "@type": "SocialMediaPosting",
   "author": {
        "@type": "UserAccount",
        "url": "http://example.com/profiles/123"
        ... whatever fields are present in the content (also potentially a real-world object)
   }
   ...
}

And on http://example.com/profiles/123:

{
   "@type": "ProfilePage,
   "mainEntityOfPage": {
       "@type": "UserAccount",
       "name": "@jennlovesdogs",
       "dateCreated": "20231223T12:30Z",
       "accountSystem": "example.com", // Though we would totally infer this in reality
       "accountOwner": {
            "@type": "Person",
            "name": "Jennifer Franklin"
      }
}

So you've pulled apart the concept of the domain account from the real world entity. I guess it's a bit more verbose because there's a nested object now whereas you are collapsing, but I think a lot of sites really just use the account concept on the content page (and might not even have a "real-world" concept if it's more of an anonymous thing) so it's not any more verbose.

[MatthiasWiesmann]

I suspect the accountOwner would be either a Person or an Organization?

[rrlevering]

Yep. So it sort of has the same range on the actual real-life entity, just with an in-between account object.

[shaedrich]

I see the need for this entity in an online context, however, would it be better or an additional option, to have an Identity entity, that is a little broader?

[WeaverStever]

I ran across an interesting concept from the implementation of ads.txt 1.1 implementation.

My thinking here is that the social-profile will probably be one of many social-profiles and that the owner of the social-profile may want to monetize (copyright etc) her published content regardless of the platform hosting the profile. Alternately, the profile owner may want to limit information that is exposed to advertisers.

In the ads.txt implementation, the ads.txt file is paired with a seller.json (in adsense I believe) are properties like ownerdomain, managerdomian etc. The ads.txt file allows the ownerdomain to whitelist advertising partners. Various settings in sellers.json indicate that the ownerdomain is selling direct or uses a reseller.

Anyway, it seems like there is an emerging ontology that might be consulted for similarity with the goals of this thread. (Instead of a website or domain, perhaps there could be a dashboard where the social-profile owner would participate.)

https://iabtechlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Ads.txt-1.1-Implementation-Guide.pdf

[github-actions]

This issue is being nudged due to inactivity.

[shaedrich]

I see the need for this entity in an online context, however, would it be better or an additional option, to have an Identity entity, that is a little broader?

Identity can include social media accounts but also email addresses, maybe even personal websites 🤔