The additionalType property exists on Business/Organization, Product and Service schemas. It allows you to define the type of the item more accurately by linking Wikipedia data to your schema via ProductOntology.org.
The property accepts a url from ProductOntology.org that is about the desired type. To generate this url, someone should first search Wikipedia for the desired term. For example, if you are marking a Product schema about an espresso machine without Actus Deep Schema, you should do the following:
- search Wikipedia for espresso machine
- Get the desired result. It’s url is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_machine
- Take the last part of this url (Espresso_machine)
- Create a url like: http://www.productontology.org/id/Espresso_machine
Assigning this url to the additionalType property will feed the Product schema with all the data that describe your product as an espresso machine.
Actus Deep Schema simplifies the whole proccess with the type wiki field. This field provides a wikipedia search engine that helps you find the desired term and it populates the additionalType property with the proper ProductOntology url automatically.
Schema.org #
Schema.org has the following description for the property:
An additional type for the item, typically used for adding more specific types from external vocabularies in microdata syntax. This is a relationship between something and a class that the thing is in. Typically the value is a URI-identified RDF class, and in this case corresponds to the use of rdf:type in RDF. Text values can be used sparingly, for cases where useful information can be added without their being an appropriate schema to reference.
ProductOntology.org #
ProductOntology.org is a website that provides “High-precision identifiers for product types based on Wikipedia”. It feeds your schema with properly formatted data that describe your business, product or service in detail. In their website there is the following note:
schema.org has just implemented our proposal to define an additionalType property with the use of this service in mind!
Despite it’s name, ProductOntology.org is not just for products but it also contains data about services and business types. The Business and Organizations type property has a lot of schema.org categories and types available but you can be more specific using the type wiki field.
