Many things beyond VisualArtwork have materials that can be described. We had http://schema.org/material for VisualArtwork but it was renamed to give us http://schema.org/artMedium.

Proposal here is to bring back 'material' as a superproperty of artMedium but applicable to more types of thing (suggest Product + CreativeWork). Definition would be "A material that something is made from. "typical values would be: leather, wool, cotton, paper." (Text/URL, to allow for controlled vocabulary).

(The property would be repeated for multiple values, rather than parsing out comma-separated lists.)

/cc @lazaruscorporation re VisualArtwork and @mfhepp re Product

/cc @RichardWallis re bib.schema.org + archives etc perspective on CreativeWork materials

Given that we have already allocated the term /material, I've convinced myself that this is a good idea (and better than wasting it with a redirect). Implemented for review:

http://webschemas.org/material

@danbri Useful bits from Wikidata

material used - material the subject is made of or derived from
product - material or product produced by a business, industry, facility, or process
source of material - place the material used was mined, quarried, found, or produced

More here: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=material&title=Special:Search&fulltext=1&searchToken=em9upypo12icyoifkmw74wctz

Some of the See Also properties are:

natural product of taxon
fabrication method
manufacturer
source of material
has part

I have no problem with this. In fact I think that VisualArtwork should be changed so that it just uses the proposed "material" property inherited from CreativeWork rather than having a specific "artMedium" property.

My reasoning can be seen on the second example I provided on the http://schema.org/VisualArtwork page - Tracey Emin's "My Bed" art installation, where the values of "artMedium" are:

  "artMedium": "bedsheets",
  "artMedium": "condoms",
  "artMedium": "a pair of knickers",
  "artMedium": "pair of slippers",
  "artMedium": "bed"

Simply put, there is no difference (these days) between an "art medium" and a more general "material".

But if we don't want to deprecate "artMedium" then that's fine - publishers can always choose to use the inherited "material" property" instead as it simply means the same thing.