Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Extended schema.org news support


We’re happy to announce that schema.org has significantly expanded its support for marking up news articles, based on the rNews standard created by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

New properties have been added to NewsArticle as well as other related types such as CreativeWork. For example, you can now specify a dateline for an article or provide information tying the online article to a printed version, such as the newspaper section and page where the article appeared. In addition, support for user comments is being added, applicable to news articles as well as a variety of other item types.

In collaboration with members of the IPTC including Evan Sandhaus (Lead Architect, Semantic Platforms at the New York Times), Stuart Myles (Deputy Director of Schema Standards at The Associated Press and Lead of the Semantic Web Working Group), and Andreas Gebhard (Managing Editor at Getty Images and Member of the IPTC Board of Directors), we’ve added news/publishing properties and aligned them with the IPTC rNews standard. Given IPTC’s reach developing technical standards on behalf of over 60 news agencies, this is an exciting partnership between search engines and content creators.

Making news metadata on the web machine readable in a standard way opens up new opportunities for innovation for both publishers and consumers of news. We look forward to seeing increased markup and interesting new applications of this data in the future.

Kavi Goel
Google