The spectrum of types that items can be assigned to ranges from broadly defined definitions, like ‘Thing’, to more specified types, like ‘Movie’. Each type, with the exception of the unspecified category, ‘Thing’, has one or more parent types.
Thing > CreativeWork > Movie
While ‘Thing’ labels an unspecific item, the type, ‘CreativeWork’ labels a more specific aspect related to the category its name describes (e.g. books, photography, or movies). The type, ‘Movie’, is a subcategory of the type ‘CreativeWork’, which in turn is a subcategory of ‘Thing’. This hierarchy shows that specific types are inherent to the properties of their parent types. An item labeled as ‘Movie’ can be paired with the specific properties of a given movie: movies have actors, directors, trailers, etc. These are all possibilities for further defining ‘Movie’.