Can’t the schema.org “sameAs” term be used with the URI? Or am I missing something?

sameAs only points to a different web reference on the internet in any format. It isn't used to enforce the JSON structure of the schema itself for interop use which is what were after.

To help clarify, our use case is as follows

person.hasCredential and organization.hasCredential are both of type EducationalOccupationalCredential
The organization credentials we wish to define are neither Educational or Occupational in nature, BUT the only values we need from it are
"identifier"
"credentialCategory" (a set list of supported credential types)
"description"
"name"
"organization" (For who issued the credential)
"dateCreated"
"url" (To access more of the credential in question - similar to sameAs element you describe above)
"expires"

None of these values are specific to a type of credential. Basically we need a more generic credential defined. The structure of the EducationalOccupationalCredential allows to be agnostic of credential type! The name of course is anything but agnostic. And it makes more sense for us not to duplicate if we can avoid it.

Hello @eislers, I lead the EOCred work that brought EducationalOccupationalCredential to schema.org. We limited the scope as you described firstly because that is where our expertise and use cases were, but also to limit how we might impinge on the W3C Verifiable Credential work which was then still in development.

I think it would be possible to develop a Credential type for schema.org as a superclass for EducationalOccupationalCredential, and possibly Permit as well.

One question that we had to deal with in the EOCred work was whether we were dealling with the VC as a whole, i.e. the claim being made that a specific person had achieved something, or describing the general properties of some qualification that they might earn / have earned. EducationalOccupationalCredential is for the latter. That's why we didn't bring in validFrom or validUntil from Permit. Again, we did this to limit how we might impinge on the W3C VC work. I raise this as you mention "expires" as a relevant property.

@philarcher @msporny @pchampin - anything to add here?

@philarcher @msporny @pchampin - anything to add here?

Thanks for the ping @danbri, yes, quite a bit to add. Some data points for this thread to consider:

• Educational/Occupational Credentials are a big focus of the Verifiable Credentials for Education Community Group at W3C, who work very closely with IMS Global (renamed to 1EdTech) -- one of the standardization bodies for the Education sector. I'm CC'ing the Chairs of that group below. Here's the mailing list: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vc-edu/
• There are active interoperability plugfests going on, that are focused on education / workforce training credentials, in the Jobs For the Future Plugfest (going from May 2022 - June 2023). You can read more here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YoS3est-YnWO1tI7JjJDjSPSnIXJNon_TFosKyneaJg/edit?pli=1#slide=id.g12d5db20be0_0_178
• The Verifiable Credentials WG is currently active, and vocabulary work is in scope (though the WG has to agree to what degree -- normative or non-normative)
• The VC spec has stated for a while now that we're going to transition to "validFrom" and "validUntil" from schema.org for a while now. I expect this to be in scope (and only mention it because of the previous comment from @philbarker)
• Fundamentally, there is a general desire to re-use schema.org when we can in the VC work. I expect some level of merging some terminology in the VC work into schema.org might be useful as well (for example, if a website wants to publish digitally signed VCs about itself in a way that search engines can pick up and use that data -- it would just be an extension to the way JSON-LD data is pulled in today).

To the original point, we are adding "name" and "description" to the VC standard in the next couple of months. We don't know about "alternateName" or "alias" yet, but I expect it might come up if there is a compelling use case for it... though, because VC's can pull in other JSON-LD Contexts, one could just pull in schema.org and use it.

As for these values, I'll point out the VC-equivalent below:

"identifier" -> id
"credentialCategory" (a set list of supported credential types) -> type
"description" -> description (in VC 2.0)
"name" -> name (in VC 2.0)
"organization" (For who issued the credential) -> issuer
"dateCreated" -> created (in the proof), or validFrom (in the credential)
"url" (To access more of the credential in question - similar to sameAs element you describe above) -> id
"expires" -> validUntil (in VC 2.0)

Hope that helps. @danbri did you have anything more specific you wanted input on?

/cc @dmitrizagidulin @kayaelle

This issue is being nudged due to inactivity.