Schema.org Workshop Wrap-Up

On September 21st, we held the first ever schema.org workshop in Mountain View, California. There were 75 attendees from web markup & standards groups (including W3C, Microformats, RDFa, Creative Commons), as well as other search engines (Ask, Yandex, Baidu), and top content publishers and tools vendors (including NYTimes, Disney, Foursquare, Shopping.com, OpenTable, Drupal, Sharepoint). The objective of this workshop was to evolve the schema.org specification, solicit feedback from the standards community, and build momentum for web publishers.

We felt the event was a success -- there was lots of enthusiasm around creating extensions to the vocabulary as well as great feedback on how to evolve the syntax. We will be working through this feedback in our working group over the coming months, so stay tuned for more developments, and thanks in advance for all your feedback.

At the workshop, we also announced a couple new schema.org developments. First, we announced that we have adopted IPTCs rNews specification into schema.org (see earlier blog post). In addition to being a fantastic vocabulary extension for news articles, we believe this a great template for future industry-specific vocabulary extensions, and there are a couple ongoing discussions for new extensions in education (working with LRMI) and for job postings (working with Whitehouse CTO). We expect continued interest in industry specific extensions, and to facilitate this discussion we also announced a new W3C-hosted venue for further discussion and engagement with the community: http://www.w3.org/QA/2011/09/proposing_two_new_sw_interest.html.

There have been a few inquiries about the next workshop. We’re planning to do another workshop in the future, but don’t have any concrete plans at this point. When we have something to announce, we’ll do it here on this blog.

Slides from the event can be found here:

http://schemaorg.cloudapp.net/2011Workshop/

Additional Coverage:

http://semanticweb.com/schema-org-workshop-a-path-forward_b23387

http://twitter.com/#!/search/schemaorg

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2011-09-22#schema__2e_org_workshop

Mike Van Snellenberg

Microsoft