My principal client, a healthcare organization, is working on leveraging Schema.org to develop a reusable, understandable, and API-first website. As the team works towards rearchitecting the website, we face the ongoing challenge of determining how our existing content model and relationships can be aligned with and migrated to a Schema.org-based content model.
Schema.org is a vocabulary that provides a standardized way of describing things on the web. It is used by search engines and other applications to understand the content of web pages.
Schema.org defines a vocabulary with 803 Types and 1465 Properties, which is a lot to take in. It can be easy to miss how your existing content types can be aligned with Schema.org. However, the Schema.org specification has been carefully thought out and developed with input from various organizations. For example, the Role type allows organizations to add additional specificity to any relationship. This is often used to define the role of members and employees within an Organization.
Despite my team's efforts, we occasionally need assistance aligning with Schema.org. This challenge led me to realize that instead of focusing on my organization's specific use case, I should look at how Schema.org can define an organization's content and information model. As a result, I created the Schema.org Blueprints Starter Kit: Organization module.
This starter kit leverages inverseOf relationships for member, employee, subOrganization, and department to arrange an organization's hierarchy and define individual roles within an organization using the Role. The starter kit includes Organization and LocalBusiness types to distinguish between an Organization being a conceptual entity and a LocalBusiness being a physical entity with a physical Place. Site builders should use sub-typing to add specificity to Organization and LocalBusiness types.
When an Organization and LocalBusiness needs dedicated access controls, authoring experience, or custom presentation, site builders should create dedicated content types and use the Convert Bundles module to switch an existing Organization content type to be a more specific sub-types. For example, a food establishment should create a dedicated Restaurant content type instead of relying on the existing Organization content type.
While building this starter kit, there were a few opportunities to improve the core Schema.org Blueprints modules. For example, a Schema.org Diagram module now displays diagrams of Schema.org-based entity reference relationships using Mermaid.js.
The Schema.org Blueprints Starter Kit: Organization module is packed with features that demonstrate how to use the content models and relationships provided by Schema.org. It is also designed to inspire you to leverage Schema.org to organize your organization's content model.
Instead of telling you more, it is better to show you a lot. Please watch the video below and review the module’s README.md, which contains most of the presentation's content.