Cookbook/Catalog groups

=Exposing catalog group information=

In many cases, you have a granular, shop-specific taxonomy of your goods and services. It makes a lot of sense to preserve this when publishing the data.

There are two basic approaches


 * category labels as raw text with gr:category or
 * creating a shop-specific formal hierarchy with subclasses of gr:ProductOrService.

In this document, we describe the former approach. This is very simple and lightweight yet sufficient so that clients can access your hierarchy for search and user interfaces.

You can also use this pattern to help Google (and other consumers of your data) to spot the best place for putting your product or offer based on the Google category name from

http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160081

Make sure to attach the proper language tag, i.e. "en" for English so that clients know the language of your category label.

Product
ACME Foldable Canoe Water Sports > Boating > Canoeing > Canoes">

Offer
Hepp Personal SCSI Controller Card The Hepp Personal SCSI is a 16-bit add-on card that allows attaching up to seven SCSI devices to your computer. Computers > Computer Components > I/O Cards" > ...

Product
 ACME Foldable Canoe  Water Sports > Boating > Canoeing > Canoes"> ...

Offer
 Hepp Personal SCSI Controller Card The Hepp Personal SCSI is a 16-bit add-on card that allows attaching up to seven SCSI devices to your computer.  Computers > Computer Components > I/O Cards"> ...

Mixing with other vocabularies
If you want to add the gr:category in Microdata to itemtypes from other vocabularies, you must use the full URI

http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#category