Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
tl;dr : Schema.org has terms for Thing, Intangible and Product, but no obvious way of describing a tangible thing that isn't necessarily a product.
I suggest the obvious : https://schema.org/Tangible, which could be inserted quietly without breaking anything (details at the bottom here).
Motivation
One of my many projects-in-progress is a Yet Another Personal Project Manager I'm calling #:Farelo.I need a model in which to describe projects, which, this being 2025, will be an ontology expressed in RDF/OWL (#:why-rdf). As it happens I've been working on this intermittently for over 20 years, I have a vocab that lives at https://purl.org/stuff/project. Some bits I'm happy with, some not so much, and there are one or two terms I intend adding. It also needs alignment with Schema.org, which seems to have taken the role of quasi-upper, maybe Standard Über Ontology.
Right now I really need the app yesterday, to manage my tensegrity structure of projects with confusing interdependencies. This time around, rather than trying to work with the software project domain right away, I thought a real-world project would be illuminating as a target. A project I have in progress is a reboot of my music room. It goes something like this :
Project : Music Room Reboot
- Shift everything out of the room
- Redecorate, make furniture,
- Apply acoustic treatment (hang mattresses from the walls)
- Clean, test and if necessary fix all the pieces of equipment
- Shift everything back into the room
- Make a lot of noise
It is a nice use case for a project management app as there are parts that are strictly sequential : I won't want to hang mattresses before redecorating. But some bits can happen in parallel : I have shifted pretty much everything out into the office (it's no longer in the initial state), where I've wired a bunch of things temporarily, so I can make a lot of noise while everything else progresses.
Stuff, a Set of Things
Ok, so how do I model all this? Ok, I've got most of what I need already covered in the project ontology, though major I am missing from the current version of the is the concept of project resources. These have a definite impact on dependency graphs. In the real world, I need to purchase paint (done!) before I can redecorate (soon...).
But, again in the real world, above I have all the pieces of equipment. For example, an analog mixer. It's a Behringer Xenyx 2442FX. The device is listed as a product, and that fits with Schema.org's term Product :
Any offered product or service. For example: a pair of shoes; a concert ticket; the rental of a car; a haircut; or an episode of a TV show streamed online.
Almost. It certainly was a product, before I bought it. I'm very unlikely to offer it as a product again - even if I'm able to get the couple of dead channels working, it also features some metalwork damage from the time I broke an acoustic guitar on it (a sudden power outage corrupted a whole day's work, I was very annoyed). Resale value - I'd probably give €20 for it if I was really stuck.
Also in the stuff is my primary guitar, The Vinocaster. A custom job, made by me to be exactly what I wanted. Which, for all practical purposes, it is. It is a product in the sense that I produced it (over many, many hours). But that's not how schema:Product is defined.
Pebble Dashed
Going a step further, how do I describe the subject of this image :
[
a schema:Thing ;
rdfs:label "pebble" ;
:weight "200"
]
Ok, so the Schema.org vocab is maintained largely by corporate entities, in the view of which the Web is a marketing tool. Chances are my local browser has encountered Schema.org terms in HTML tags a few dozen times already today. Thing [sic] is, the Web is more than just a marketing tool.
So how about :
Tangible is a subclass of Thing disjoint from Intangible. It has the description of "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses". (Product is a subclass of the union of Tangible and Intangible).
A Modest Proposal
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> .
@prefix : <http://example.org/ontology#> .
# Define Tangible as a subclass of Thing, disjoint from Intangible
schema:Tangible a owl:Class ;
rdfs:label "Tangible" ;
dc:description "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses" ;
owl:subClassOf schema:Thing ;
owl:disjointWith schema:Intangible .
schema:Product a owl:Class ;
owl:subClassOf [
a owl:Class ;
owl:unionOf ( schema:Tangible schema:Intangible )
] .
:MyLittlePebble a schema:Tangible ;
:weight "300" .
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
tl;dr : Schema.org has terms for Thing, Intangible and Product, but no obvious way of describing a tangible thing that isn't necessarily a product.
I suggest the obvious : https://schema.org/Tangible, which could be inserted quietly without breaking anything (details at the bottom here).
Motivation
One of my many projects-in-progress is a Yet Another Personal Project Manager, this one I'm calling #:Farelo. I need a model in which to describe projects, which, this being 2025, will be an ontology expressed in RDF/OWL (#:why-rdf). As it happens I've been working on this intermittently for over 20 years, I have a vocab that lives at https://purl.org/stuff/project. Some bits I'm happy with, some not so much, and there are one or two terms I intend adding. It also needs alignment with Schema.org, which seems to have taken the role of quasi-upper, maybe Standard Über Ontology.
Right now I really need the app yesterday, to manage my tensegrity structure of projects with confusing interdependencies. This time around, rather than trying to work with the software project domain right away, I thought a real-world project would be illuminating as a target. A project I have in progress is a reboot of my music room. It goes something like this :
Project : Music Room Reboot
- Shift everything out of the room
- Redecorate, make furniture,
- Apply acoustic treatment (hang mattresses from the walls)
- Clean, test and if necessary fix all the pieces of equipment
- Shift everything back into the room
- Make a lot of noise
It is a nice use case for a project management app as there are parts that are strictly sequential : I won't want to hang mattresses before redecorating. But some bits can happen in parallel : I have shifted pretty much everything out into the office (it's no longer in the initial state), where I've wired a bunch of things temporarily, so I can make a lot of noise while everything else progresses.
Stuff, a Set of Things
Ok, so how do I model all this? Ok, I've got most of what I need already covered in the project ontology, though major I am missing from the current version of the is the concept of project resources. These have a definite impact on dependency graphs. In the real world, I need to purchase paint (done!) before I can redecorate (soon...).
But, again in the real world, above I have all the pieces of equipment. For example, an analog mixer. It's a Behringer Xenyx 2442FX. The device is listed as a product, and that fits with Schema.org's term Product :
Any offered product or service. For example: a pair of shoes; a concert ticket; the rental of a car; a haircut; or an episode of a TV show streamed online.
Almost. It certainly was a product, before I bought it. I'm very unlikely to offer it as a product again - even if I'm able to get the couple of dead channels working, it also features some metalwork damage from the time I broke an acoustic guitar on it (a sudden power outage corrupted a whole day's work, I was very annoyed). Resale value - I'd probably give €20 for it if I was really stuck.
Also in the stuff is my primary guitar, The Vinocaster. A custom job, made by me to be exactly what I wanted. Which, for all practical purposes, it is. It is a product in the sense that I produced it (over many, many hours). But that's not how schema:Product is defined.
Pebble Dashed
Going a step further, how do I describe the subject of this image :
[
a schema:Thing ;
rdfs:label "pebble" ;
:weight "200"
]
Ok, so the Schema.org vocab is maintained largely by corporate entities, in the view of which the Web is a marketing tool. Chances are my local browser has encountered Schema.org terms in HTML tags a few dozen times already today. Thing [sic] is, the Web is more than just a marketing tool.
So how about :
Tangible is a subclass of Thing disjoint from Intangible. It has the description of "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses". (Product is a subclass of the union of Tangible and Intangible).
A Modest Proposal
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> .
@prefix : <http://example.org/ontology#> .
# Define Tangible as a subclass of Thing, disjoint from Intangible
schema:Tangible a owl:Class ;
rdfs:label "Tangible" ;
dc:description "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses" ;
owl:subClassOf schema:Thing ;
owl:disjointWith schema:Intangible .
schema:Product a owl:Class ;
owl:subClassOf [
a owl:Class ;
owl:unionOf ( schema:Tangible schema:Intangible )
] .
:MyLittlePebble a schema:Tangible ;
:weight "300" .
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
Journal 2025-06-09
I broke #:Postcraft for a bit, left this hanging. Come back to it later...
Foraging for SPARQL
This is prompted by what I've been doing with my Semem, but I reckon it's worth saying, foraging doesn't get the appreciation it deserves in the tech world.
GraphRAG with SPARQL
Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging
Journal 2025-06-09
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
tl;dr : Schema.org has terms for Thing, Intangible and Product, but no obvious way of describing a tangible thing that isn't necessarily a product.
I suggest the obvious : https://schema.org/Tangible, which could be inserted quietly without breaking anything (details at the bottom here).
Motivation
One of my many projects-in-progress is a Yet Another Personal Project Manager I'm calling #:Farelo.I need a model in which to describe projects, which, this being 2025, will be an ontology expressed in RDF/OWL (#:why-rdf). As it happens I've been working on this intermittently for over 20 years, I have a vocab that lives at https://purl.org/stuff/project. Some bits I'm happy with, some not so much, and there are one or two terms I intend adding. It also needs alignment with Schema.org, which seems to have taken the role of quasi-upper, maybe Standard Über Ontology.
Right now I really need the app yesterday, to manage my tensegrity structure of projects with confusing interdependencies. This time around, rather than trying to work with the software project domain right away, I thought a real-world project would be illuminating as a target. A project I have in progress is a reboot of my music room. It goes something like this :
Project : Music Room Reboot
- Shift everything out of the room
- Redecorate, make furniture,
- Apply acoustic treatment (hang mattresses from the walls)
- Clean, test and if necessary fix all the pieces of equipment
- Shift everything back into the room
- Make a lot of noise
It is a nice use case for a project management app as there are parts that are strictly sequential : I won't want to hang mattresses before redecorating. But some bits can happen in parallel : I have shifted pretty much everything out into the office (it's no longer in the initial state), where I've wired a bunch of things temporarily, so I can make a lot of noise while everything else progresses.
Stuff, a Set of Things
Ok, so how do I model all this? Ok, I've got most of what I need already covered in the project ontology, though major I am missing from the current version of the is the concept of project resources. These have a definite impact on dependency graphs. In the real world, I need to purchase paint (done!) before I can redecorate (soon...).
But, again in the real world, above I have all the pieces of equipment. For example, an analog mixer. It's a Behringer Xenyx 2442FX. The device is listed as a product, and that fits with Schema.org's term Product :
Any offered product or service. For example: a pair of shoes; a concert ticket; the rental of a car; a haircut; or an episode of a TV show streamed online.
Almost. It certainly was a product, before I bought it. I'm very unlikely to offer it as a product again - even if I'm able to get the couple of dead channels working, it also features some metalwork damage from the time I broke an acoustic guitar on it (a sudden power outage corrupted a whole day's work, I was very annoyed). Resale value - I'd probably give €20 for it if I was really stuck.
Also in the stuff is my primary guitar, The Vinocaster. A custom job, made by me to be exactly what I wanted. Which, for all practical purposes, it is. It is a product in the sense that I produced it (over many, many hours). But that's not how schema:Product is defined.
Pebble Dashed
Going a step further, how do I describe the subject of this image :
[
a schema:Thing ;
rdfs:label "pebble" ;
:weight "200"
]
Ok, so the Schema.org vocab is maintained largely by corporate entities, in the view of which the Web is a marketing tool. Chances are my local browser has encountered Schema.org terms in HTML tags a few dozen times already today. Thing [sic] is, the Web is more than just a marketing tool.
So how about :
Tangible is a subclass of Thing disjoint from Intangible. It has the description of "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses". (Product is a subclass of the union of Tangible and Intangible).
A Modest Proposal
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> .
@prefix : <http://example.org/ontology#> .
# Define Tangible as a subclass of Thing, disjoint from Intangible
schema:Tangible a owl:Class ;
rdfs:label "Tangible" ;
dc:description "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses" ;
owl:subClassOf schema:Thing ;
owl:disjointWith schema:Intangible .
schema:Product a owl:Class ;
owl:subClassOf [
a owl:Class ;
owl:unionOf ( schema:Tangible schema:Intangible )
] .
:MyLittlePebble a schema:Tangible ;
:weight "300" .
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?
tl;dr : Schema.org has terms for Thing, Intangible and Product, but no obvious way of describing a tangible thing that isn't necessarily a product.
I suggest the obvious : https://schema.org/Tangible, which could be inserted quietly without breaking anything (details at the bottom here).
Motivation
One of my many projects-in-progress is a Yet Another Personal Project Manager, this one I'm calling #:Farelo. I need a model in which to describe projects, which, this being 2025, will be an ontology expressed in RDF/OWL (#:why-rdf). As it happens I've been working on this intermittently for over 20 years, I have a vocab that lives at https://purl.org/stuff/project. Some bits I'm happy with, some not so much, and there are one or two terms I intend adding. It also needs alignment with Schema.org, which seems to have taken the role of quasi-upper, maybe Standard Über Ontology.
Right now I really need the app yesterday, to manage my tensegrity structure of projects with confusing interdependencies. This time around, rather than trying to work with the software project domain right away, I thought a real-world project would be illuminating as a target. A project I have in progress is a reboot of my music room. It goes something like this :
Project : Music Room Reboot
- Shift everything out of the room
- Redecorate, make furniture,
- Apply acoustic treatment (hang mattresses from the walls)
- Clean, test and if necessary fix all the pieces of equipment
- Shift everything back into the room
- Make a lot of noise
It is a nice use case for a project management app as there are parts that are strictly sequential : I won't want to hang mattresses before redecorating. But some bits can happen in parallel : I have shifted pretty much everything out into the office (it's no longer in the initial state), where I've wired a bunch of things temporarily, so I can make a lot of noise while everything else progresses.
Stuff, a Set of Things
Ok, so how do I model all this? Ok, I've got most of what I need already covered in the project ontology, though major I am missing from the current version of the is the concept of project resources. These have a definite impact on dependency graphs. In the real world, I need to purchase paint (done!) before I can redecorate (soon...).
But, again in the real world, above I have all the pieces of equipment. For example, an analog mixer. It's a Behringer Xenyx 2442FX. The device is listed as a product, and that fits with Schema.org's term Product :
Any offered product or service. For example: a pair of shoes; a concert ticket; the rental of a car; a haircut; or an episode of a TV show streamed online.
Almost. It certainly was a product, before I bought it. I'm very unlikely to offer it as a product again - even if I'm able to get the couple of dead channels working, it also features some metalwork damage from the time I broke an acoustic guitar on it (a sudden power outage corrupted a whole day's work, I was very annoyed). Resale value - I'd probably give €20 for it if I was really stuck.
Also in the stuff is my primary guitar, The Vinocaster. A custom job, made by me to be exactly what I wanted. Which, for all practical purposes, it is. It is a product in the sense that I produced it (over many, many hours). But that's not how schema:Product is defined.
Pebble Dashed
Going a step further, how do I describe the subject of this image :
[
a schema:Thing ;
rdfs:label "pebble" ;
:weight "200"
]
Ok, so the Schema.org vocab is maintained largely by corporate entities, in the view of which the Web is a marketing tool. Chances are my local browser has encountered Schema.org terms in HTML tags a few dozen times already today. Thing [sic] is, the Web is more than just a marketing tool.
So how about :
Tangible is a subclass of Thing disjoint from Intangible. It has the description of "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses". (Product is a subclass of the union of Tangible and Intangible).
A Modest Proposal
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> .
@prefix : <http://example.org/ontology#> .
# Define Tangible as a subclass of Thing, disjoint from Intangible
schema:Tangible a owl:Class ;
rdfs:label "Tangible" ;
dc:description "a thing which is apprehensible as physically real or existent by the senses" ;
owl:subClassOf schema:Thing ;
owl:disjointWith schema:Intangible .
schema:Product a owl:Class ;
owl:subClassOf [
a owl:Class ;
owl:unionOf ( schema:Tangible schema:Intangible )
] .
:MyLittlePebble a schema:Tangible ;
:weight "300" .
Where are the Tangibles in Schema.org?