About schema.org initiative

Dear Members of the Group

Our goal is to propose, discuss, create and maintain extensions to schema.org related to meat items commonly traded internationally. Let us briefly explain what schema.org is.

On the schema.org website we read:

Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.

Schema.org provides a core, basic vocabulary for describing the kind of entities the most common web applications need. There is often a need for more specialized and/or deeper vocabularies, that build upon the core. The extension mechanisms facilitate the creation of such additional vocabularies.
With most extensions, we expect that some small frequently used set of terms will be in core schema.org, with a long tail of more specialized terms in the extension.

There are two kinds of extensions: reviewed/hosted extensions and external extensions. Both kinds of extensions typically add subclasses and properties to the core. Properties may be added to existing and/or new classes. More generally, they are an overlay on top of the core, and so they may add domains/ranges, superclasses, etc. as well. Extensions have to be consistent with the core schema.org. Every item in the core (i.e., http://schema.org/) is also in every extension. Extensions might overlap with each other in concepts (e.g., two extensions defining terms for financial institutions, one calling it FinancialBank and other calling it FinancialInstitution), but we should not have the same term being reused to mean something completely different (e.g., we should not have two extensions, one using Bank to mean river bank and the other using Bank to mean financial institution).

Our meat.schema.org extension is intended to be a hosted extension of schema.org and as such it will share types and properties with the “core” of schema.org.

More about schema.org:

1. schema.org documentation
2. Article “Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web“