Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Schema.org 2.0


We are pleased to announce the public release of Schema.org 2.0 which brings several significant changes and additions, not just to the vocabulary, but also to how we grow and manage it, from both technical and governance perspectives.


As schema.org adoption has grown, a number groups with more specialized vocabularies have expressed interest in extending schema.org with their terms. Examples of this include real estate, product, finance, medical and bibliographic information. Even in something as common as human names, there are groups interested in creating the vocabulary for representing all the intricacies of names. Groups that have a special interest in one of these topics often need a level of specificity in the vocabulary and operational independence. We are introducing a new extension mechanism which we hope will enable these and many other groups to extend schema.org.

Over the years, Schema.org has taken steps towards become more open. Today, there is more community participation than ever before. The newly formed W3C Schema.org Community Group is now the main forum for schema collaboration, and provides the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list for discussions. Schema.org issues are tracked on GitHub. The day to day operations of Schema.org, including decisions regarding the schema, are handled by a newly formed steering group, which includes representatives of the sponsor companies, the W3C and some individuals who have contributed substantially to Schema.org. Discussions of the steering group are public.

Schema.org is a ‘living’ spec that is constantly evolving. Sometimes this evolution can be an issue, such as when other standards groups want to refer to it. So, from this release on, we will be providing snapshots of the entire vocabulary.


And of course, we cannot have a major release without new vocabulary. In this version, we introduce vocabulary for Autos. This represents considerable work by Martin Hepp, Mirek Sopek, Karol Szczepanski and others in the automotive-ontology.org community. In addition, this version also includes a lot of cleanup. A special thanks to Vicki Holland and Dan Brickley for driving this effort.


Over the last four years Schema.org has gotten adoption beyond our wildest expectations. We are deeply grateful to the webmaster and developer communities for this. We will continue working hard to earn your trust.

Guha