Re: LocalBusinessDepartment proposal for schema.org.

Potentially extremely useful - thanks for the draft Dan!

In regard to your question on the Wiki, "is this peculiar to LocalBusiness,
or would we potentially want the same for any Organization?" I am
definitely in favor of allowing this type and properties to be used by any
Organization.

This is particularly valuable for corporate entities, where the parent
company cannot be considered a local business, even though its branches are
decidedly so.  This is precisely the case with U-Haul (a Wiki example),
which is a corporation with a name, head office physical address, URI and
other properties, but also has branches with their own set of properties.
If LocalBusinessDepartment was restricted to the type LocalBusiness a page
that, say, was an entry for U-Haul and listed linked locations would have
to use one type for the main entry (Corporation) and another, unconnected
type (LocalBusiness) for the branch links.  In other words, there would be
no way to formally say "the U-Haul at 1 Maple St., Middleville, OH, is a
local outlet of the corporation U-Haul."  (I'm not entirely sure how one
would or could differentiate "larger 'local businesses'" from any corporate
entity that has local outlets:  that is what qualifies a "business" as
"local"?)

Currently, of course, there is no mapping of these sort of parent/child
relationships for LocalBusiness as the type (as per the description)
includes both "a restaurant" and "a particular branch of a restaurant
chain."

An aside that the granularity of LocalBusiness sub-types and properties
would often be useful if applied to other Organization types. For example,
"department / departmentOf" would have obvious utility in marking up a
resource produced by the History Department of the University of Exeter
(the History Department being a departmentOf CollegeOrUniversity rather
than an CollegeOrUniversity in its own right), or the Toronto Organization
of Amnesty International (the Toronto Organization could be considered a
departmentOf the NGO Amnesty International).


On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:

> Here's a draft of a proposal for a LocalBusinessDepartment addition to
> 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.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>