In our quest to model Schema.org classes in TypeScript, we’ve so far managed to model the type hierarchy, scalarDataTypevalues, and enums. The big piece that remains, however, is representing what’s actually inside of the class: it’s properties.

After all, what it means for a JSON-LD literal to have "@type" equal to "Person" is that certain properties — e.g. "birthPlace" or "birthDate", among others — can be expected to be present on the literal. More than their potential presence, Schema.org defines a meaning for these properties, and the range of types their values could hold.

Schema.org has a concept of a DataType, things like Text, Number, Date, etc. In JSON-LD, we represent these as strings or numbers, rather than array or object literals. This data could describe the name of a Person, a check-in date and time for a LodgingReservation, a URL of a Corporation, publication date of an Article, etc. As we’ll see, the Schema.org DataType hierarchy is far richer than TypeScript’s type system can accommodate. In this article, we’ll go over the DataType hierarchy and explore how much type checking we can provide.

Last time, we talked about modeling the Schema.org class hierarchy in TypeScript. We ended up with an elegant, recursive solution that treats any type Thing as a "@type"-discriminated union of ThingLeaf and all the direct sub-classes of the type. The next challenge in the journey of building TypeScript typings for the Schema.org vocabulary is modeling Enumerations.

Let’s look at a few examples from the Schema.org website to get a better sense of what Enumerations look like.

Recently, I published schema-dts (npm, GitHub), an open source library that models JSON-LD Schema.org in TypeScript. A big reason I wanted to do this project is because I knew some TypeScript type system features, such as discriminated type unions, powerful type inference, nullability checking, and type intersections, present an opportunity to both model what Schema.org-conformant JSON-LD looks like, while also providing ergonomic completions to the developer.

In a series of posts, I’ll go over some of the Structured Data concepts that lent themselves well to TypeScript’s type system, and those concepts that didn’t. First up: the type hierarchy of JSON-LD Schema.org Schema, and how can be represented in TypeScript.