Documentation/Conventions

= Conventions for the User's Guide = In the next sections, we explain the conceptual structure of the GoodRelations vocabulary (and thus of the e-commerce model in schema.org). On this page, we define the conventions for illustrations and other elements.

Illustrations of Conceptual Structures
In essence, GoodRelations is a conceptual model that defines entity types, relationship types, enumerated values, and hierarchical relations among entity types and among properties. Since GoodRelations can be used in many different syntaxes, both RDF-based syntaxes and other popular syntaxes, we use a special type of diagram for illustrating the conceptual elements and how they relate. The notation is more concise than typical RDF graph visualizations, and more intuitive for RDF and JSON developers than e.g. UML class diagrams (for classes) or UML object diagrams (for instances).


 * Entities are shown as circles.
 * They are labeled with a short characterization in plain English (like "Offer") in boldface and the official keyword/URI as a CURIE (e.g. gr:Offering) directly below. Since there can be naming differences between GoodRelations and schema.org for the same element in the two namespaces, the schema.org variant is also always given and marked in red (e.g. schema:Offer). A CURIE is a compact form of writing down URIs by substituting the often long base URI by a short prefix (e.g. "gr:" for "http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#").
 * Entities that represent the user's local data are filled in orange. Entities that are given as external identifiers are filled in grey. Those are mostly enumerated values from GoodRelations.
 * Relationships are labeled with the CURIE of the respective property in the original GoodRelations namespace (black) and in schema.org (red).
 * Literal values are shown as rectangles, labeled with either an example or a short description of the type of value.

The following figure gives an annotated example:

The equivalent Turtle syntax for the example shown in the figure above would be as follows:

The same structure in Microdata would look as follows:

The same structure in RDFa would be as follows:

Warnings, Tips, and Notes
The following message boxes highlight aspects that require special attention.