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Legal Information for Organizations (Issue #4366)#4439

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alex-jansen merged 1 commit intoschemaorg:mainfrom
fthobe:4366-organization-fix
May 5, 2025
Merged

Legal Information for Organizations (Issue #4366)#4439
alex-jansen merged 1 commit intoschemaorg:mainfrom
fthobe:4366-organization-fix

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@fthobe
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@fthobe fthobe commented Apr 29, 2025

The following commit completes legal information of Organizations to comply with the optional properties of an Imprint. Following properties have been added:

  • companyRegistration with the range Certification
  • legalAddress with the range PostalAddress
  • legalRepresentative with the range Person.

Closes: #4366

Background regarding the legal information required on company run websites in Europe

Germany, Austria and other jurisdiction require companies (organizations) to publish all legal information of a company on their website. Also Google does that for example here:
Google Germany Imprint

In fact for example to be eligible to run Google Ads you are required to ad the information to your own website.

It is advised by many search engines to use this page (or any other about us page) to contain the structured data about the website publishing organization. Facebook for example also allows to add the information to pages:
Add an Impressum to your Facebook Page

We seemingly have everything in there inside organization, but not the basic legal fields that are even required by Google to do certain things.

Fixes: #4366

Addition of new properties to Organization

To allow standardisation of the information set I have tried with this PR to align the organization structured data with the legal requirements of the imprint by allowing more values.

  • legalRepresentative (Person): the legal representative of a company such as CEO or managing director.
  • company registration (certification): the company registry number and the issuer of the number.

Upon close inspection following values are not mandatory but can be contained in the Imprint:

  • Common Stock Capital of your LLC or unlisted company (eg. 10.000 EUR of which 2.500 EUR Paid up);
    legal representative

Example Implementation

The example below contains also a proposal for stock capital, if desired.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "url": "https://www.google.com",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://example.net/profile/example1234",
    "https://example.org/example1234"
  ],
  "logo": "https://www.google.com/images/logo.png",
  "name": "Google",
  "legalName": "Alphabet LLC",
  "legalRepresentative": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Larry Page"
  },
  "hasCompanyRegistration": {
    "@type": "Certification",
    "issuedBy": {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "name": "Chamber of Commerce of Wondertown"
    },
    "name": "Company Registration",
    "certificationIdentification": "WT-123456"
  },
  "description": "The example corporation is well-known for producing high-quality widgets",
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "telephone": "+47-99-999-9999",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "Rue Improbable 99",
    "addressLocality": "Paris",
    "addressCountry": "FR",
    "addressRegion": "Ile-de-France",
    "postalCode": "75001"
  },
  "legalAddress": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "Rue Improbable 99",
    "addressLocality": "Paris",
    "addressCountry": "FR",
    "addressRegion": "Ile-de-France",
    "postalCode": "75001"
  },
  "vatID": "FR12345678901",
  "iso6523Code": "0199:724500PMK2A2M1SQQ228"
}

The following commit completes legal information of Organizations to comply with the optional properties of an Imprint. Following properties have been added: 

- companyRegistration with the range Certification
- legalAddress with the range PostalAddress
- legalRepresentative with the range Person.
@fthobe
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fthobe commented Apr 29, 2025

Should be fine now. @gmackenz

Sorry for the trouble

@alex-jansen alex-jansen merged commit bb5820d into schemaorg:main May 5, 2025
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@alex-jansen
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Since those are brand new properties it would have been better to add them to Pending first (we typically add new things first to pending, and only after there is some proven adoption by the ecosystem we move them out of Pending). However, since it does not seem very controversial I will go ahead this time without the Pending tag.

@fthobe
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fthobe commented May 5, 2025

Hey, I will align with that for future requests.

Is there any past PR that you feel illustrates best how to implement pending fields?

@gmackenz
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gmackenz commented May 5, 2025

Hey, I will align with that for future requests.

Is there any past PR that you feel illustrates best how to implement pending fields?

#3441 is a recent example

@itsgroup-co-nz
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Hi, the new Organization legal information was previously published and accessible through the main shcema.org website. However, legalAddress, hasCompanyRegistration, and legalRepresentative result in 404 erors and do not appear the latest release v29.3.

There doesn't appear to be other threads on this, so posting here, as the merge doesn't seem to have completed.

@alex-jansen
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alex-jansen commented Sep 8, 2025

Hmm, from the diffs it seems this (as well as #4371, #4445, #4440) got accidentally reverted by #4449. Looking into fixing this...

alex-jansen pushed a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 8, 2025
The following commit completes legal information of Organizations to comply with the optional properties of an Imprint. Following properties have been added: 

- companyRegistration with the range Certification
- legalAddress with the range PostalAddress
- legalRepresentative with the range Person.
@alex-jansen
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This should be fixed now, @itsgroup-co-nz can you verify on your side?

@itsgroup-co-nz
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This should be fixed now, @itsgroup-co-nz can you verify on your side?

Great, thanks for checking that out!

All appears to be working now; validates, and als no 404 errors on the main site.

@fthobe fthobe deleted the 4366-organization-fix branch January 16, 2026 12:38
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