Wednesday, July 20, 2011

On June 2nd we announced a collaboration between Bing, Google and Yahoo to create and support a standard set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Although our companies compete in many ways, it was evident to us that collaboration in this space would be good for each search engine individually and for the industry as a whole.

In the short time since the announcement we’ve received a lot of great feedback. We have participated in some conferences and we have seen a lot of discussion about our proposal on the web. We’ve also seen the Association of Educational Publishers publically announce their intention to build an industry specific extension! We’re genuinely pleased to see so much interest in the topic as it is very important to the work we do.

We have been reading all of the feedback, following the discussions and debating amongst our working group many of the concerns and suggestions that have been raised. We have not been able to respond to all of the feedback, but we have incorporated some of it into our site already and we will continue to iterate on that.

Going forward, this blog will serve as a vehicle for the team to share our thoughts, solicit feedback, announce schema updates and so on.

In that spirit, I'm happy to announce that we will be hosting a schema.org workshop to take place on September 21st in Silicon Valley. As a group we are deeply committed to working with the standards communities, tools vendors and organizations committed to driving industry specific extensions so we hope this workshop will be the first of many successful collaborations.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be reaching out to the leaders in the appropriate standards communities, amongst the tools vendors and in the vertical industries where extensions make the most sense inviting them to participate. This will be a working session – taking feedback, discussing options and figuring out the best way to incorporate it to make this simple and useful for publishers and the search engines. If you would like to be involved please send an email to workshop@schema.org.

We are really looking forward to these discussions and we will share what we learn here on this blog. In the meantime, please continue to share your feedback.

Thanks again!

Michael O’Connor
Bing