Re: Abstract services and organisations under LocalBusiness

Marco:

The underlying GoodRelations model uses two distinct types for this

    http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#BusinessEntity 

for the legal agent and

    http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#Location

for a place from which goods or services, or rights on these, can be obtained.

In schema.org, the business entity is either a schema:Organization or schema:Person (there is to date no common superclass, like schema:Agent despite quite some argument for such a type).

Places are modeled as schema:LocalBusiness.

Now, in schema.org, schema:LocalBusiness is hard-wired to be a subtype of both schema:Place and schema:Organization, because in most practical cases ("Joe's Pizza Place"), the two entities are practically conflated and many owners would find it a mere exercise to model the two distinct entities behind it. Often, available data also does not readily provide the distinction; so it makes sense to have this somewhat blurry type.

Linking between the legal entity and its points of sale is easy; simply use http://schema.org/hasPOS between the two.

Now, as for the subtypes of schema:LocalBusiness: I am no big fan of modeling the range of products and services by subtyping schema:LocalBusiness. 
Way more flexible and conceptually cleaner is it to model the range of products and services via a schema:Offer type attached to the entity. Note that you can perfectly model a schema:Offer with just a textual description of what you offer in the schema:name and schema:description properties.

Hope this helps.


Best

Martin
-----------------------------------
martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org          @mfhepp




> On 07 Jun 2017, at 18:46, Marco Brandizi <marco.brandizi@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I don't quite get the rationale behind subclasses of http://schema.org/LocalBusiness. For instance, in AutomotiveBusiness, BankOrCreditUnion, or even TelevisionStation, there are examples of businesses as entities, which can have their own local places (branches, shops, etc), but for which one needs to model the organisation as a whole (e.g., Mc Donald's as a global corporation, having thousands of restaurants, ie, instances of LocalBusiness, everywhere).
> 
> How do you expect to deal with such a distinction? To have a "LocalBusiness" that has the headquarters as schema:address? Or am I missing something?
> 
> Thank you in advance for any help,
> 
> Marco.
> 
> -- 
> 
> =========================================================================
> Marco Brandizi <name.surname at gmail>
> http://www.marcobrandizi.info
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2017 17:16:24 UTC