Schema.org

Schema.org is an initiative launched on 2 June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo!^[1][2][3] (the operators of the then world's largest search engines)^[4] to “create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.” On 1 November Yandex (whose search engine is the largest one in Russia) joined the initiative.^[5][6] They propose using their ontology and Microdata in HTML5 to mark up website content with metadata about itself. Such markup can be recognized by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus gaining access to the meaning of the sites (see Semantic Web). The initiative started with a small number of formats, but the long term goal is to support a wider range of schemas.^[7] The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties.^[8] A mailing list is provided, for discussion of the initiative.^[9]

Much of the vocabulary on schema.org was inspired by earlier formats such as Microformats, FOAF, GoodRelations and OpenCyc.^[10] Microformats such as hCard, however, continue to be published more than schema and others on the web.^[11]

RDF applications can use Microdata2RDF service.^[12] getSchema^[13] is a community wiki maintaining a set of markup examples.

A mapping from the terms defined in Schema.org to RDF (expressed in RDF Schema) is available.^[14]

To test the validity of the data marked up with the schemas and Microdata, such validators as Google Rich Snippets Validator,^[15] Yandex Microformat validator^[16] and Bing Markup Validator^[17] can be used.

Examples

Microdata

The following is an example^[18] of how to mark up information about a movie and its director using the schema.org schemas and microdata. In order to mark up the data the attribute itemtype along with the url of the schema is used. The attribute itemscope defines the scope of the itemtype. The kind of the current item can be defined by using the attribute itemprop.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
  <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
  Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span> 
(born <time itemprop="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)
  </div>
  <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
  <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

RDFa 1.1 Lite

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Movie">
  <h1 property="name">Avatar</h1>
  <div property="director" typeof="Person">
  Director: <span property="name">James Cameron</span>
(born <time property="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)
  </div>
  <span property="genre">Science fiction</span>
  <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" property="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

References

External links

• schema.org
• blog.schema.org
• schema.rdfs.org RDF, Turtle, JSON, CSV
• schema.org/docs/schema_org_rdfa.html RDFa
• schema.org/docs/schemaorg.owl OWL
• original discussion group, now moved to W3C
• GetSchema Annotating HTML5 with Schema.org and Microdata. An Example Wiki.
• Free Schema.org Parser