Re: LocalBusinessDepartment proposal for schema.org.

On 3/5/13 12:01 PM, Justin Boyan wrote:
  We could define
> "department" on Organization rather than on LocalBusiness, and make the
> new target type "Department" a subclass of Organization. The problem is
> that "Department" then wouldn't inherit the openingHours and
> openingHoursSpecification fields from LocalBusiness.... and
> per-department opening hours is a driving use case here. Any ideas?

We will continue to run into such problems if we attempt to create all 
of the schemas through hierarchies. It might be useful to think of 
"free-floating facets"[1] for those properties that may be usable in a 
number of different circumstances, like locations, addresses, hours, 
owner, time (dates of existence, creation), etc. Either that, or a whole 
bunch of properties need to be defined at the Thing level. And in the 
spirit of linked data, shouldn't it be possible to link any two 
organizations without one being subordinate to the other?

I'm not sure that the convenience of inheritance out-weighs the 
inconvenience of trying to fit everything into particular hierarchical 
levels.

kc


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification

>
> Justin
>
> Inline image 1
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Tom Morris <tfmorris@gmail.com
> <mailto:tfmorris@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com
>     <mailto:danbri@google.com>> wrote:
>
>         Here's a draft of a proposal for a LocalBusinessDepartment
>         addition to
>         schema.org <http://schema.org>. It is pretty small. Basic idea
>         is that some larger 'local
>         businesses' have a variety of named departments, which are worth
>         describing as independent entities (e.g. opening hours etc.).
>
>         http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/LocalBusinessDepartment
>
>         The suggestion is for one new type, LocalBusinessDepartment,
>         alongside
>         a pair of properties (department / departmentOf) that associate a
>         LocalBusinessDepartment with a LocalBusiness. For simplicity a
>         LocalBusinessDepartment is also considered a LocalBusiness (thus
>         inheriting all applicable properties, our primary goal).
>
>         I'll try to flesh out with some full markup examples, but I hope
>         this
>         sketch is enough to get some discussion moving.
>
>
>     That seems like a useful addition, but I don't see how the U-Haul &
>     USPS example apply since any given location is typically relatively
>     monolithic.  I was assuming this would be something like an auto
>     dealer where the Parts department closes at 5 pm, Service might be
>     open slightly later until 6 pm, and Sales is open until 9 pm or
>     whenever there's a remote chance that someone will wander in with
>     money.
>
>     Tom
>
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Wednesday, 6 March 2013 00:50:10 UTC