Thursday, November 21, 2013

Schema.org v1.0d published: TV/Radio, Civic Services, ContactPoint, Event and Organization improvements

Schema.org version 1.0d has been published. This release brings a number of practical additions and improvements - here's a high level overview. As always, the schema.org site has a full listing of the entire vocabulary, and W3C's WebSchemas group has details of the background discussions.

Civic Services. As we described earlier, this work provides vocabulary such as GovernmentService for describing services of various kinds. As part of this work, we have also updated ContactPoint, which now for example provides a mechanism for describing contact points for services which support users with hearing impairments.

TV/Radio. These long-awaited changes bring a number of adjustments to the existing schema.org vocabulary for TV, including adding parent types such as Series with distinct types for RadioSeries and TVSeries. Many thanks are due to Yves Raimond (BBC) and Jean-Pierre Evain (European Broadcasting Union) for leading this work.

We also made a small but useful improvement to the Organization type, by adding department and
subOrganization properties that relate organizations to each other. This can be used when describing common situations such as a bookshop containing a coffeeshop, or a larger store that includes a pharmacy, when details such as opening hours or contact information vary.

Finally, we made some changes to the Event type, adding support - via an eventStatus property - for canceled, postponed or rescheduled events, as well as a previousStartDate property to help describe rescheduled events more accurately.