Hard vs loose specs for Offers and Wants and beyond
We met Wednesday with the Madison WI Mutual Aid Network. It was the second session in an ongoing project to define vocabs and protocols for intertrading between different software (Community Forge and Wezer, for example) and different Mutual Aid Networks (Madison and St Johns, Newfoundland, for example).
One interesting aspect of their vocabs is that their Offers and Wants are described much more loosely than so far described in this (OVN) vocabulary.
The OVN vocab, inherited from REA and https://github.com/valnet/valuenetwork, describes resources that flow in networks as Resource Types, which are usually (but not always) described relatively precisely. In commercial exchanges, for example, material resources exchanged are usually described by a Global Trade Identification Number (GTIN).
Offers and Wants in the Mutual Aid Network, on the other hand, are described by plain text, one of some fairly general categories, and some tags.
The organizers of the Mutual Aid Network would prefer somewhat more precision, but more in terms of lists of desired features than one named type that comes with its own definition. It reminded me of Netention.
It also made me think, maybe we should separate out a Resource vocab. Related to (but not the same as) https://schema.org/Product and gr:ProductOrService (both of which are Resource Types in the current OVN vocab). Resource Type would be part of that vocab.
Aside: gr:Individual is GoodRelations new name for "an actual product or service instance", (that is, a Resource). Seems like a uniquely bad name...