strange schema.org/location error output

[jvandriel]

Every time the linter runs into markup containing statements about a schema.org/Person's homeLocation or workLocation it generates an error message:

property schema:location: Subject <http://example.org/#WileECoyote> not compatible with domainIncludes (schema:Action,schema:Event,schema:InteractionCounter,schema:Organization)

Somehow the location property (parent property of the others) gets shown in the output, which rightfully triggers the error message, though I am clueless as to why this property gets added. Is this a bug in the schema.org vocabulary or in the Linter?

What's extra confusing is that I only have seen it happen in regards to Person statements.

Markup example:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@id": "#WileECoyote",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Wile E. Coyote",
  "workLocation": {
    "@id": "#FantasyLand",
    "@type": "Country",
    "name": "Fantasy land"
  }
}
</script>

[gkellogg]

Thanks for bringing up the issue. I think it is, indeed, a bug in the linter, but a challenging one to fix. Person is a valid range of workLocation, even though it is not of location. But, because of that way that subPropertyOf works, :a :workLocation :b. implies :a :location :b..

The definition of workLocation is:

:workLocation a rdf:Property ;
    rdfs:label "workLocation" ;
    :domainIncludes :Person ;
    :rangeIncludes :ContactPoint,
        :Place ;
    rdfs:comment "A contact location for a person's place of work." ;
    rdfs:subPropertyOf :location .

From RDFS, we can see via rdfs5:

``xxx rdfs:subPropertyOf yyy . yyy rdfs:subPropertyOf zzz . => xxx rdfs:subPropertyOf zzz .

The fact that _location` does not have Person in its range is not an error, as RDFS doesn't have error conditions. The linter is inferring a problem given the inferred triples.

The fix is probably to filter out errors of this kind, but that's going to be hard to do.

[gkellogg]

Actually, the way to address it is probably to add a rule such as the following:

aaa rdfs:subPropertyOf bbb .
aaa schema:domainIncludes ddd .

=>

bbb schema:domainIncludes ddd .

Same thing for schema:rangeIncludes.

[jvandriel]

Thanks for the reaction @gkellogg.

I can imagine you have a ton of other things to do before tackling this. I'm already happy to know I wasn't seeing ghosts for once.

If you'll ever get around to fixing it it'd be great, if not, at least it's documented in this issue.

[jvandriel]

Just for the sakes of documenting the issue in case people are searching for it, here's another example of the same issue:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@id": "#ShortStory",
  "@type": ["DefinedTerm", "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q49084"],
  "termCode": "ShortStory",
  "url": "https://schema.org/ShortStory",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://schema.org",
  "sameAs": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story"
}
</script>