The Stage That We Are At

Hi All,

I thought I would update the group as to where we are at in the process of proposing ways for the Schema.org vocabulary to increase its capabilities for marking up financial organisations, their products and services for structured data discovery on the web.

Mirek described in the Invitation to Participation, this work started as an initiative of the EDMC who engaged an international team to help build the basis of a proposal for a hosted fibo.schema.org extension to the vocabulary.

That work, inspired by FIBO, identified several potential Types and properties that would probably add value to the broad core of Schema.org and lay the foundation for a more detailed, financial industry focused, fibo extension to follow.

A ‘proposal for the core’ is what we are concentrating on at the moment with the proposals and examples that have been shared on the wiki, and loaded into a test version of the Schema.org site at sdo-fibo.appspot.com.

How to view the Proposals.  If you are viewing them as a financial industry expert, you may well find these generic terms as being light on industry specific detail.  This is a deliberate approach to make these general terms understandable and applicable across a broad spectrum of use cases that spreads wider than specific financial organisations.  For example a furniture store describing 6 months interest-free credit on all chairs purchased in December.  This whilst laying the foundation and basic capability for a bank to describe the products and services it has to offer.

Enhancements to Service.  As part of this proposal we are recommending that several properties applicable to Product have Service added to their domain.  These properties are: aggregateRating, audience, brand, isRelatedTo, isSimilarTo, logo, and review.   Whilst adding value to our, financial oriented, proposal also echoes previous discussions generally in the Schema.org communities to align Product and Service properties more closely.

Like any Schema.org proposal it is open for discussion until it is part of a ship.  I invite comments and or questions from anyone that is interested.  The intension is to fairly quickly propose this to the main Schema.org group, via a pull request to the schemaorg Github repository and opening up the discussion to the wider community.

New to Schema.org?  If you are new to Schema.org and its concepts, you might find this background article, from those at the heart of it, useful reading.  Also if you would like an insight into the process this is all part of – applying markup, using the Schema.org site, and creating extensions – I can recommend a webinar series I recently recorded, Schema.org in TwoParts, especially part 2.

~Richard.