Re: LocalBusinessDepartment proposal for schema.org.

Tom, I agree that U-Haul hours are typically monolithic, so that example
should be removed from the draft (and replaced with the nice car dealership
example).  USPS is another story... my local post office has 12 (count
them, see attached) different sets of opening hours!

Aaron, schema.org/LocalBusiness does already provide branchOf ->
Organization, which address the Middleville, OH U-Haul outlet case.
You're right that more general organizations, such as a university, could
benefit from having a "department" field. 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?

Justin

[image: Inline image 1]


On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Tom Morris <tfmorris@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:23 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.
>
>
> 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
>