Schema.org Introduces Defined Terms

Do you have a list of terms relevant to your data?

Things such as subjects, topics, job titles, a glossary or dictionary of terms, blog post categories, ‘official names’ for things/people/organisations, material types, forms of technology, etc., etc.

Until now these have been difficult to describe in Schema.org. You either had to mark them up as a Thing with a name property, or as a well known Text value.

The latest release of Schema.org (3.4) includes two new Types – DefinedTerm and DefinedTermSet – to make life easier in this area.

The best way to describe potential applications of these very useful types is with an example:

Imagine you are an organisation that promotes and provides solid fuel technology…. 

In product descriptions and articles you endlessly reference solid fuel types such as “Coal”, “Biomass”, “Peat”, “Coke”, etc. For the structured of your data, in product descriptions or article subjects, these terms have important semantic value, so you want to pick them out in your structured data descriptions that you give the search engines.

Using the new Schema.org types, it could look something like this:

As DefinedTermSet is a subtype of CreativeWork, it therefore provides many properties to describe the creator, datePublished, license, etc. of the set of terms.

Adding other standard properties could enhance individual term definitions with fuller descriptions, links to other representations of the same thing, and short codes.

For example:

There are several other examples to be found on the type definition pages in Schema.org.

For those looking for ways to categorise things, with category codes and the like, take a look at the subtypes of these new Types –  CategoryCode and CategoryCodeSet.

The potential uses of this are endless, it will be great to see how it gets adopted.