Defining multiple URLs within a Person

Question

I'm defining a Schema.org Person item on my website using Microdata. Most of it is self-explanatory.

However, each mini profile on a summary page has three URLs - one which links to the Person's full ProfilePage, and two more for LinkedIn and Twitter.

Do I define all three as URLs, or do I ignore the social media account URLs, because only the "read more" style link is actually the URL for that person?

Answer 1

For the link to the person’s profile page on your site, you should ‎definitely use the url property.

For the links to the person’s profiles on other sites, the answer isn’t that clear¹:

• Using the url property wouldn’t be wrong, but I think it makes sense to use url only for your own "canonical" page of the item.

• Using the contactPoint property can be appropriate if the profile should be used to contact the person. However, it expects a ContactPoint item as value, which might be a bit too expressive for the case of a mere link (but you don’t have to follow the expectation, so you could just provide a URL instead of a ContactPoint item).

• Using the sameAs property seems to be appropriate if the external profile identifies/represents exactly the same person (and nothing else in addition).

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¹ There is no Schema.org property for linking to social media profiles (yet).