Maximizing the use of the tags field for better searching

[geoffturk]

There are a few "special" fields that the index looks for and records when analyzing a profile:

• geolocation object (with the latitude and longitude fields) - or the latitude and longitude fields separately
• primary_url
• locality, region and country
• tags

The tags field is an array of strings that is meant to contain a wide range of keywords that define the entity or item being described by the schema. So for an organization, this might include things like the context in which it operates, the type of legal entity it is recognized as, its key activities, etc. The more useful information included in the tags array, the more possibilities that are enabled for aggregators to sort that organization into various data taxonomies they may want to use. IOW, more tags make it simpler to categorize that organization in various ways.

Schemas should be making use of this field whenever they want to record data that can facilitate categorization in the future. If the field is not called tags, but is instead called something else, the array of data captured will not be recorded in the Index. For example, if we look at the first version of the Murmurations Map schema, we see the use of a field called org_type_tags. Clearly the intention here was to define a standalone field that captured tags only related to the organizations type of legal (or lack thereof) entity. But this data is not indexed by the Index. Instead what schema authors should do to ensure this subset of descriptive keyword data is indexed is to add a custom-defined tags field directly inside of the schema:

"tags": {
  "title": "Org Type - freeform tags",
  "description": "What type of Organisation is this? e.g. Private limited company, School, Co-op, etc.",
  "type": "array",
  "items": {
    "type": "string"
  },
  "uniqueItems": true
}

Notice that the structure of this "custom" field is identical to the tags field in the library. The only difference is the title and description the author gives to it, so that it can be clear what the context of the tags will be for this field within this single schema. The scope of the above field is focused on the type of organization. But it could be easily expanded to something wider:

"tags": {
  "title": "All About Your Org",
  "description": "Keywords that describe the type of organization, what you do or create, etc.",
  "type": "array",
  "items": {
    "type": "string"
  },
  "uniqueItems": true
}