This repository was set up to for the maintenance and further development of the GS1 Germany Web Vocabulary.
The GS1 Web Vocabulary (WebVoc), an official extension to schema.org, is a method for describing trade items, companies, locations, and more using linked data concepts. This structured data, often in the form of JSON-LD documents, enables IT applications to understand the contained information semantically. All globally defined terms are accessible both in a human-friendly way as well as in machine-readable datasets (see https://ref.gs1.org/voc/). To address country-specific demands and to facilitate easier migration, GS1 Germany provides an own Web Vocabulary in a similar manner on https://voc.gs1.de/.
What's in it for my company? The GS1 (Germany) Web Vocabulary enables various use cases:
- When embedded in the source code of your Web Pages, it helps search engines and other accessing applications to better find your trade items when consumers look for specific products.
- It also allows your company to provide structured data (e.g. location, company, product master data files and more) that your trading partners can easily understand/integrate. There are several ways to link to these files (e.g. indexing in Verified by GS1, pointing directly to it via a GS1 Digital Link URI, etc).
- In addition, it can also be embedded in EPCIS events, contributing to better scalability and interoperability.
We apply semantic versioning, i.e. MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Applied to this WebVoc, this means:
- MAJOR: not backward compatible changes
- MINOR: backward compatible modifications such as adding new or removing properties, classes, and code values
- PATCH: small changes such as fixing typos
The addition of new classes, properties, and code lists/values needs to comply with GS1 Germany's standardisation process (see GS1 Germany Gremienhandbuch for further information).
At the same time, in case you encounter an issue or have a suggestion for improvement, feel free to either submit an Issue or make a Pull Request. Any help or support is highly appriciated.