0.1 · pre-release

An open standard for restaurants

Your dining room, your menu, your guests — described once, and yours to keep.

ORDER is one open document for everything a restaurant runs on — its profile, floor plan, tables, service periods, menu, and reservations. Export it, carry it to any platform, and keep a copy that is genuinely yours. No lock-in.

Read the spec See the schema

Yours to export
Take it anywhere
Open licence · CC BY 4.0

Sala Principale · floor plan

Reserved Seated Open

Why it exists

Your data shouldn’t be held hostage by your software.

Change booking systems today and your floor plan, your tables, your service rules, and your guest history usually stay behind. ORDER exists so a restaurant can pick all of it up and walk — the way GDPR Article 20 always intended.

The reason it gets stuck is simple: nobody ever standardised the operational restaurant. Three bodies of prior art already touch restaurant data — and not one of them has a word for the things you run on.

Already out there What it covers Has no word for

schema.org Menu, profile, opening hours, reservations — for search engines any word for a table, a seat, a section, or a floor plan

Menu-sync specs Enterprise menu distribution to point-of-sale systems floor plans, tables, or service periods

Reserve with Google Materialised availability slots the restaurant itself — a one-way feed for a single consumer

The floor, the tables, and the rules that make them bookable have no interchange format at all. ORDER is that format. Read the full rationale

Your rules, not a timetable

ORDER carries the rules you actually set — “lunch, Monday to Wednesday, noon to three, in two turns of ninety minutes” — not the brittle list of slots those rules happen to produce this week. The rules travel; the slots are a lossy print-out of them.

Reads on Google, too

ORDER lines up with schema.org wherever a word for something exists, so every export doubles as the structured data search engines read — while staying strict enough to reject a document that is wrong, which a vocabulary built to describe the whole web cannot.

Portable by design

There is no lock-in to unpick. The schema is a file, the reference checker is a library, and importing a restaurant’s data costs a vendor nothing to support. Built with GDPR Article 20 in mind.

What ORDER describes

Your restaurant, in four chapters.

Everything that makes a restaurant a restaurant — the room, the menu, the hours, and the people you keep it for — written down in one place, in terms that belong to you.

Your dining room

Rooms and their floor plan, every table and where it sits, seat counts, and the groups you join together for a party of eight.

Rooms
Floor plan
Tables
Table groups

Your service

When you open, and for whom — lunch and dinner, the turns within them, and the days you close. The rules you set, not a frozen list of slots.

Service periods
Turns
Closures

Your guests

The reservations themselves — who is coming, when, and for how many — kept in an optional module, so everything else stays free of personal data.

Reservations
Covers
Optional module

For developers

Underneath, it’s just an open document.

None of the warmth above costs you rigour. ORDER is a single normative JSON Schema, a reference validator, and two clean projections — open-licensed, versioned, and machine-checkable.

Schema: JSON Schema 2020-12, at a versioned URL
Validator: MIT reference library — structure + reference graph
Projections: schema.org JSON-LD · Reserve with Google
Modules: core (no personal data) · reservations
Licence: spec CC BY 4.0 · code MIT

Read the conformance rules

trattoria-da-mario.order.json

{
	"order_version": "0.1",
	"modules": ["core", "reservations"],
	"restaurant": {
		"ref": "trattoria-da-mario",
		"name": "Trattoria da Mario",
		"timezone": "Europe/Rome",
		"currency": "EUR"
	},
	"rooms": [{ "ref": "main", "name": "Sala Principale" }],
	"tables": [
		{
			"ref": "t12",
			"room_ref": "main",
			"seats": { "min": 2, "max": 6 }
		}
	],
	"service_periods": [
		{
			"ref": "lunch",
			"days": ["monday", "tuesday", "wednesday"],
			"opens": "12:00",
			"closes": "15:00"
		}
	]
}

A complete ORDER document. Validates against the published schema.

The documents

/spec/ Specification The full ORDER 0.1 specification: every entity, its fields, and the rules that bind them together. /spec/order/0.1/schema.json JSON Schema The normative, machine-readable schema. Point any JSON Schema 2020-12 validator straight at it. /spec/examples/ Examples Complete, valid ORDER documents you can copy as a starting point — validated on every CI run. /spec/conformance/ Conformance What a conformant producer and consumer must do, and what every validator warning means. /spec/projections/ Projections How an ORDER document maps onto schema.org JSON-LD and the Reserve with Google availability feed. /spec/schema-reference/ Schema reference Every field in the schema, entity by entity, in a human-readable index of the machine-readable source.