Email to the type Museum

[nikant25]

Currently, the top-level type such as Museum is the sub-type of CivicStructure. However, museums are rather a local business or organization. For this reason, this type does not have an email, but has fax (probably it is already out of date) and also has no contact points. It will probably be logical to set the type Museum as the sub-type of LocalBusiness or Organization. It may be useful to create a separate sub-type such as a CulturalOrganization.

Some of the main clients of museums are foreign tourists. It is a big doubt that users who plan to visit a museum will look for a fax machine or make an expensive call to another country to find out what details.

[felipesanti]

In my opinion improving CivicStructure if needed would be a better alternative than setting Museum as a subclass of Organization. The main reasons are:

1. CivicStructure is a subclass of Place, and Organization is not. And, in today's world, it makes more sense to me to keep Museum as a Place.
2. CivicStructure captures the concept of "public structure", which a Museum is, be it funded by a public or private organization. Some museums could be regarded primarily as LocalBusiness, e.g. Madame Tussaud, but it is more the exception than the rule.

[nikant25]

In my humble opinion, the functions of the museum are closer to the organization. The main activity of museums is the presentation of the exhibit which in turn can be a Civic Structure. However, the main problem is that the Museum type does not have an email.

[felipesanti]

The question is whether the Museum is the organization that provides the collection exhibited to the public, @nikant25 which seems to be your point of view, or the place where the collection is exhibited, which is the current interpretation and the one I tend to adhere. Other points of view would be most welcome.

[jroedel]

Perhaps the question here is why the Email property is limited to Organizations or Persons. The following are sub classes of Place:

• Accommodation
• AdministrativeArea (no email)
• CivicStructure
• Landform (no email)
• LandmarksOrHistoricalBuildings
• LocalBusiness
• Residence
• TouristAttraction
• TouristDestination

I propose that all except AdministrativeArea and Landform should have an email property as this can be, IMHO, an essential piece of information.

I'm currently modelling a Church and add to list the email contact as an additionalProperty.

[RichardWallis]

See issue #7 for the context of the move from the main Schema.org issue tracker to this repository.