WebSchemas/LocalBusinessDepartment

From W3C Wiki

Overview

This page discusses a proposal extending schema.org to introduce the notion that a 'LocalBusiness' may have different departments.

The motivation is to allow representation of the department name, phone numbers, and opening hours for each department within a local business branch (see the websites of uhaul, walmart, and usps for examples of where this could be useful). (e.g. try '90210' into locator in https://www.usps.com/ or http://www.uhaul.com/Locations/ ...

It seems common to have different contact info, opening hours etc, for different service offerings within the same larger branch. The proposed representation is to introduce a new property, "department", on LocalBusiness (and a convenience inverse, "departmentOf"). That property's target type would be:

Thing > Organization > LocalBusiness > LocalBusinessDepartment

Status

We have a sketched proposal here:

The natural next steps before finalizing the addition are:

• circulate on public-vocabs, to schema.org partners, and interested W3C groups (e.g. eGov)
• make some examples
• check scope of definition (LocalBusiness, Organization); confirm property/type names
  • w.r.t. hasUnit from the W3C Org vocab; v close, but schema.org does not use the 'hasFoo' naming idiom (declare samePropertyAs?).
  • is this peculiar to LocalBusiness, or would we potentially want the same for any Organization?

Vocabulary

• a new type, LocalBusinessDepartment (inherits name, phone numbers, and opening hours from LocalBusiness, and adds just one new property)
• add 'department' to existing LocalBusiness type (perhaps also to Organization)
• a new property, departmentOf ("The larger organization or business to which this department belongs."), whose value is LocalBusiness (potentially Organization instead, but consistent with whatever we say for 'department')