Schema.org’s model: multi-inheritance types, multi-domain properties, not a world ontology

The page describes schema.org’s model: types in a multiple-inheritance hierarchy, and properties that may list multiple domain and range types. Multiple domains and ranges were chosen pragmatically to avoid artificial types. The canonical machine representation is RDF/Turtle; the schema can reflect on itself via Class, Property, domainIncludes, and rangeIncludes.

Search and content teams embed this vocabulary so crawlers and applications share entity types without inventing parallel schemas. Knowing it is not a global ontology sets expectations: extend or combine rather than force every concept into schema.org alone.

For governed shared meaning, the important claim is interoperability of the datamodel—types, properties, domains, ranges—across JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. That shared substrate lets semantic models sit beside schema.org terms instead of fighting a single closed taxonomy.

By default any property may have multiple values, treated as an unordered set in the underlying RDF triples model, with ordered collections called out as a special case when sequence matters.