Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Schema.org 3.3: News, fact checking, legislation, finance, schedules, howtos, tourism and toilets!

Schema.org 3.3 has been released. As always, the release was prepared, debated and finalized by the schema.org community group, and features a range of additions, adjustments, bugfixes and clarifications to improve the expressiveness and usability of our schemas.


See the release notes for full details, but of particular note are some changes made around the NewsArticle type (in collaboration with the Trust Project on whose work this is largely based). For many years, our definition of NewsArticle was simply "a news article". With this release we add (via our "pending" mechanism) some more subtlety around News, making it possible to mark-up categories of news including opinion pieces, background articles, reportage, as well as as also introducing types for satirical and advertiser content. We also add properties that encourage greater transparency around News creation and publication. These are flagged as "pending" to emphasize that early adopter feedback on the new vocabulary is particularly welcomed, via Github, the W3C group, or the site's feedback form. These developments complement our earlier work to support interoperability amongst fact-checking sites via the ClaimReview type. Following discussion at GlobalFact4 conference, we have also amended the definition of the "expires" to highlight its applicability to fact checking content.

Other highlights of 3.3 include new terminology (also pending implementor feedback) for describing legislation, based on the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) ontology and the work of the ELI taskforce. We have also added an overview page giving more details on our finance-related terminology, contributed by the FIBO community, alongside a proposed design for describing schedules, new subtypes distinguishing user from critic reviews, and a generalization of our recipes schema called "HowTo" for recipe-like tasks that don't result in food. We've also added types for TouristAttraction and for PublicToilet...