Modernizing US health provider sites to improve directory accuracy

The world's attention has turned to healthcare this year, with many initiatives exploring the use of open data and standards. Schema.org has made a number of efforts already to contribute to the global Coronavirus response, including the creation of SpecialAnnouncement markup, improvements around events, jobs, hospital reporting, and other schemas to reflect our changed reality. 

This week we have invited longstanding Schema.org collaborator Aneesh Chopra to provide an introduction to some important developments in the United States, where Schema.org is being used to improve the accuracy of information about healthcare provider directories. 

Guest post by Aneesh Chopra, former U.S. CTO (2009-2012) and President/Co-Founder of CareJourney:

Just over 9 years ago, the schema.org community launched a markup for JobPostings, an important resource to meet a call to action in helping veterans find jobs that valued their skills. During the early months of the pandemic, this community responded with an important upgrade to the nation’s health IT infrastructure to democratize access more trusted health information online.

Today, at an API Summit hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Kathy Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced an open collaboration that builds upon the same regulations and industry standards to improve another important aspect of the consumer health navigation experience - searching for timely, accurate provider directory information.

For many Americans, finding a health plan that includes their trusted providers is critically important, but often requires tedious work looking up each plan’s provider directory. Sadly, as CMS found in a recent review, nearly 50% of provider directories contained inaccuracies regarding whether the provider was accepting new patients, practicing at the address listed, or reachable via the listed phone number. 

Regulators have attempted to solve these problems by imposing penalties on government-sponsored plans for inaccurate information, but an additional solution may be at hand. A provision embedded in CMS’ interoperability regulations requires government-sponsored health plans to publish machine-readable access to timely directory information by July 2021. In an effort to reduce administrative burdens, a multi-stakeholder collaborative is looking to both improve the quality of physician websites to include this information and to enable health plans to source timely, accurate information from them to comply with the rules.

Similar to the work that was done to make it easier for consumers to find COVID announcements on physician websites, such as testing availability, revised office hours or telemedicine services, this collaborative will work to standardize how to publish structured provider directory information. To further simplify the search experience, providers can now publish their website URL when updating their “digital contact information” on CMS’ NPPES NPI Registry.

Adding structured data from a provider’s website to the portfolio of tools health plans use today – including plan-agnostic reporting tools, “secret shopper” visits, mailings, and a number of emerging data-driven solutions – should result in a reduction in the administrative burden of updating physician directories. Directory maintenance is burdensome. The average practice has over 20 health plan contracts and directories to maintain with over 50% of these updates being conducted via phone or fax. According to a 2019 CAQH (Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare®) report, the average practice spends $1,000 each month for directory maintenance. Yet at the same time, physician practices find value in online marketing as a way to attract new patients, and invest an average of $650 per month to design websites and optimize search results, according to a study by Zocdoc. A web standardization effort will therefore have multiple benefits. It will allow physicians to more efficiently communicate useful information via search engines that can also be used to populate health plan directories and to meet regulatory compliance, thus reducing administrative burdens. 

CareJourney, with support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, seeks to engage public and private sector stakeholders in an effort to accelerate the development and adoption of schema.org web standards for physician information, and to curate a portfolio of tools to structure this information on a practice’s website. Our goal is to improve consumer access to provider information while lowering physician burden. We anticipate the following benefits: 

• Increased consumer access to high-quality, accurate provider information, such as whether a doctor, practicing at this location, is seeing new patients from my plan.
• Consistent webpage documentation and maintenance practices that are sufficient to meet health plan regulatory requirements
• Improved search engine results by leveraging the structured website markup 

This effort will benefit from the active participation of the healthcare community and we welcome additional participants to play a part in our initiative. Assistance in testing and providing feedback on the proposed web standards will be critical and extremely helpful in further promotion and adoption. Once the resulting open information and markup instructions are freely available, we welcome assistance in the widespread dissemination. Finally, we are grateful the prominent search engines are engaged in a process for site maintenance that ensures physicians keep their websites properly structured at the lowest possible administrative burden.

Thank you, in advance, for your interest in advancing this important work! Please sign up here to participate!

COVID-19 schema for CDC hospital reporting

The COVID-19 pandemic requires various medical and government authorities to aggregate data about available resources from a wide range of medical facilities. Clearly standard schemas for this structured data can be very useful.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the U.S. defined a set of data fields to facilitate exchange of this data. We are introducing a Schema.org representation of these data fields. 

The purpose of this schema definition is to provide a standards-based representation that can be used to encode and exchange records that correspond to the CDC format, with usage within the U.S. primarily in mind. While the existence of this schema may provide additional implementation options for those working with US hospital reporting data about COVID-19, please refer to the CDC and other appropriate bodies for authoritative guidance on the latest reporting workflows and data formats.

Depending upon context, any of the formats and standards that work with Schema.org may be applicable for encoding this data, including the Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD data formats, as well as related technologies such as W3C SPARQL for data query. JSON-LD is in most cases likely to be the most appropriate format. There is no assumption that data encoded using this schema should necessarily be published on the public Web, nor that it would be used by search engines.

We will continue to improve this vocabulary in the light of feedback, and welcome suggestions for improvements and additions particularly from US healthcare organizations who are using it. This CDC-based vocabulary follows other recent changes we have made to Schema.org. For details of recent changes see our release notes and our previous post announcing the SpecialAnnouncement markup, which is now supported at both Bing (blog, docs) and Google (blog, docs). As the global response to COVID-19 evolves we will do our best to improve schema.org's vocabularies to represent the changes that Coronavirus is bringing to society, and to assist those using structured data to help with the response.

Schema for Coronavirus special announcements, Covid-19 Testing Facilities and more

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a large number of “Special Announcements” pertaining to changes in schedules and other aspects of everyday life. This includes not just closure of facilities and rescheduling of events but also new availability of medical facilities such as testing centers.

We have today published Schema.org 7.0, which includes fast-tracked new vocabulary to assist the global response to the Coronavirus outbreak.

It includes a "SpecialAnnouncement" type that provides for simple date-stamped textual updates, as well as markup to associate the announcement with a situation (such as the Coronavirus pandemic), and to indicate URLs for various kinds of update such a school closures, public transport closures, quarantine guidelines, travel bans, and information about getting tested.  

Many new testing facilities are being rapidly established worldwide, to test for COVID-19. Schema.org now has a CovidTestingFacility type to represent these, regardless of whether they are part of long-established medical facilities or temporary adaptations to the emergency.

We are also making improvements to other areas of Schema.org to help with the worldwide migration to working online and working from home, for example by helping event organizers indicate when an event has moved from having a physical location to being conducted online, and

whether the event's "eventAttendanceMode" is online, offlline or mixed. 

We will continue to improve this vocabulary in the light of feedback (github; doc), and welcome suggestions for improvements and additions particularly from organizations who are publishing such updates. 

Dan Brickley, R.V.Guha, Google.
Tom Marsh, Microsoft.

Schema.org 6.0

Schema.org version 6.0 has been released. See the release notes for full details.  As always, the release notes have full details and links (including previous releases e.g. 5.0 and 4.0).

We are now aiming to release updated schemas on an approximately monthly basis (with longer gaps around vacation periods). Typically, new terms are first added to our "Pending" area to give time for the definitions to benefit from implementation experience before they are added to the "core" of Schema.org. As always, many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release of Schema.org.

--
Dan Brickley, for Schema.org.

Schema.org 3.5: Simpler extension model, projects, grants and funding schemas, and new terms for describing educational and occupational credentials

Schema.org version 3.5 has been released. This release moves a number of terms from the experimental "Pending" area into the Schema.org core. It also simplifies and clarifies the Schema.org extension model, reducing our emphasis on using named subdomains for topical groups of schemas. New terms introduced in Pending area include improvements for describing projects, grants and funding agencies; for describing open-ended date ranges (e.g. datasets); and a substantial vocabulary for Educational and Occupational Credentials. Many thanks to all who contributed!

Datacommons.org and Schema.org

Over the past few years we have seen a number of application areas benefit from Schema.org markup. Schema.org discussions have often centered around the importance of ease of use, simplicity and adoption for publishers and webmasters. While those principles will continue to guide our work, it is also important to work to make it easier to consume structured data, by building applications and making more use of the information it carries. We are therefore happy to welcome the new Data Commons initiative, which is devoted to sharing such datasets, beginning with a corpus of fact check data based on the schema.org ClaimReview markup as adopted by many fact checkers around the world. We expect that this work will benefit the wider ecosystem around structured data by encouraging use and re-use of schema.org related datasets.

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...

Schema.org 3.2: courses, fact-checking, digital publishing accessibility, menus and more...

Schema.org 3.2 is released! This update brings many improvements including new vocabulary for describing courses, fact-check reviews, digital publishing accessibility, as well as a more thorough treatment of menus and a large number of pending proposals which are offered for early-access use, evaluation and improvement. We also introduce a new "hosted extension" area, iot.schema.org which provides an entry point for schema collaborations relating to the Internet of Things field. As always, our releases page has full details.

These efforts depend entirely on a growing network of collaborations, within our own W3C Community Group and beyond. Many thanks are due to the Schema Course Extension Community Group, the IDPF's Epub Accessibility Working Group, members of the international fact-checking network including the Duke Reporters Lab and Full Fact, the W3C Web of Things and Spatial Web initiatives, the Bioschemas project, and to Wikipedia's Wikidata project.

This release also provides the opportunity to thank two of our longest-serving steering group members, whose careers have moved on from the world of structured data markup. Peter Mika and Martin Hepp have both played leading roles in Schema.org since its earliest days, and the project has benefited greatly from their insight, commitment and attention to detail.

As we look towards future developments, it is worth taking a brief recap on how we have organized things recently. Schema.org's primary discussion forum is a W3C group, although its most detailed collaborations are typically in Github, organized around specific issues and proposed changes. These discussions are open to all interested parties. Schema designs frequently draw upon related groups that have a more specific topical focus. For example, the Courses group became a hub for education/learning metadata experts from LRMI and others. This need to engage with relevant experts also motivated the creation of the "pending" area introduced in our previous release. Github is a site oriented towards computer programmers. By surfacing proposed, experimental and other early access designs at pending.schema.org we hope we can reach a wider audience who may have insight to share. With today's release, we add 14 new "pending" designs, with courses, accessibility and fact-checking markup graduating from pending into the core section of schema.org. Future releases will follow this pipeline approach, encouraging greater consistency, quality and clarity as our vocabulary continues to evolve.

schema.org update: hotels, datasets, "health-lifesci" and "pending" extensions...

Schema.org 3.1 has been released! Many thanks to everyone in the community who has contributed to this update, which includes substantial new vocabulary for describing hotels and accommodation, some improvements around dataset description, as well as the usual collection of new examples, bugfixes, usability, infrastructural, standards compatibility and conceptual consistency improvements.

This release builds upon the recent 3.0 release. In version 3.0 we created a health-lifesci extension as a new home for the extensive collection of medical/health terms that were introduced back in 2012. Publishers and webmasters do not need to update their markup for this change, it is best considered an improvement to the structure of our documentation. Our extension system allows us to provide deeper coverage of specialist topics without cluttering the core project pages. Version 3.0 also included some improvements from the FIBO project, improving our representation of various financial products.

We have also introduced a special extension called "pending", which provides a place for newly proposed schema.org terms to be documented, tested and revised. We hope that this will help schema proposals get wider visibility and review, supporting greater participation from non-developer collaborators. You should not need to be a computer programmer to be part of our project, and "pending" is one step towards making work-in-progress schema proposals more visible without requiring knowledge of highly technical systems like GitHub. We have linked each term in pending.schema.org to the technical discussions at Github, but also to a simple feedback form. We anticipate updating the "pending" area relatively frequently, in between formal releases.

The site also features a new "how we work" document, oriented towards the Web standards community and toolmakers, explaining the evolving process we have adopted towards creating new and improved schemas. See also commentary on this in the UK government technology blog post about making job adverts more open with schema.org.

Many people were involved in these updates, but particular thanks are due to Martin Hepp for leading the hotels/accommodation design, and to Marc Twagirumukiza for chairing the "schemed" W3C community group that led the creation of our new health-lifesci extension.

Finally, we would like to dedicate this release to Peter Mika, who has served on our steering group since the early days. Peter has stepped down as Yahoo's representative, passing his duties to Nicolas Torzec. Thanks, Peter! Welcome, Nicolas...

For more details on version 3.1 of schema.org, check out the release notes

GS1 Web vocabulary: welcoming the first schema.org external extension

Since our version 2.0 release, schema.org is putting increasing emphasis on extensions created through a broad network of community collaborations. Today we celebrate an important milestone in the development of this extensions framework: GS1 have published an initial release of their Web vocabulary. An overview document provides more background, and the schemas itself are published at gs1.org/voc/

GS1's SmartSearch initiative has been working with the schema.org community (at W3C and Github), creating a Web-based structured data vocabulary that extends schema.org to support richer product data description. Unlike our hosted extensions (e.g. bib.schema.org, auto.schema.org) that are reviewed, versioned and published as part of schema.org itself, external extensions to schema.org such as GS1's are fully independent and have their own workflows, review processes and infrastructure.

In the case of GS1 the extension vocabulary builds upon an extensive set of pre-existing B2B standards. While this means that in some places there is some divergence between the GS1 terminology and schema.org's, we share a common approach that builds upon the core vocabulary of schema.org and upon underlying foundational standards from W3C such as JSON-LD.

As the work evolves we expect the combination of schema.org and GS1's vocabularies to provide for significantly richer online product descriptions for use in Web search, combining the descriptive depth of GS1 terminology with the broad coverage of schema.org's. We will continue to collaborate with the GS1 team via the schema.org W3C community group to document best practices for combining schema.org terms with the new GS1 vocabulary, both in terms of making the most of the technical features of JSON-LD, and through gradual improvements that bring our vocabularies into closer alignment. While there is still much to be explored, this week's milestone is important as it is the first large scale external extension to schema.org. 

Schema.org: what's new?

[starburst visualization of schema.org's hierarchy]

It's time for a round-up of recent developments at schema.org.

We have just published version 2.2. As usual this combines many small fixes with a mix of new vocabulary, as well as efforts to improve the integration and documentation of our existing vocabulary. And as always you can read the full details in our releases page, which in turn links to our issue tracker for even more details. Here are some highlights:

• We made a number of improvements relating to the description of services, including the addition of providerMobility to indicate dynamic locations, OfferCatalog for hierarchical collections of offers, as well as introduced the notion of a GeoCircle to make it possible to describe service availability in terms of distance from a point or postcode.
• A new type: ExhibitionEvent for describing exhibitions (e.g. in museums, galleries), alongside a property workFeatured that indicates a CreativeWork featured in an Event. This is quite a typical schema.org change: it generalizes existing vocabulary - workPerformed, workPresented - to cover more scenarios with less terminology. 
• Added an inverse of the makesOffer property: offeredBy to simplify the description of not-for-profit offers (e.g. library book lending).
• Improved our support for feed-oriented structured data, by adding DataFeed and DataFeedItem. 
• Introduced a new type to represent barcodes.

These are just a small sample of the vocabulary changes introduced in v2.2. This release also includes non-vocabulary improvements, such as a simpler feedback form (available from every page in the 'more...' section), some updates to the FAQ on documentation re-use and https. We are aware that the technical nature of our issue tracking site on Github is not ideal for some people, and hope that the improved feedback form will make it easier for the project to listen to a broader audience.

Finally, the illustration above is included here as a reminder that there is more to schema.org collaboration than fixing bugs and adding new vocabulary. The interactive version applies the D3 visualization toolkit to exploring the schema.org hierarchy. Thanks to Fabio Valsecchi (who made this starburst demo), Gregg Kellogg and Sandro Hawke for their investigations in this area. We are collecting visualization ideas and links in our issue tracker. Another area we also encourage collaboration is around finding even simpler ways of sharing schema.org structured data. In particular we would like to draw attention to the CSV on the Web work at W3C, which offers new ways of mapping between tabular datasets and schema.org-style descriptions. To join our discussions on vocabularies, visualization, syntax issues and more, you can join the schema.org community group at W3C.

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

Schema.org v1.93: VisualArtwork, Invoices, plus lots of fixes and improvements.

Version v1.93 of schema.org has just been released.  As we mentioned in the previous update we are working towards a stable "version 2" release. This isn't yet v2.0, but it serves as a foundation,

fixing a variety of small issues across many schemas and examples. 

This release also introduces new vocabulary for describing visual artworks: a new VisualArtwork type alongside supporting properties - artEdition, artform, material and surface. Many thanks to Paul Watson for leading that work. See also Paul's blog posts about the schema, its mapping to the VRA Core 4, and its use with Getty's Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) via Linked Data.

Invoices and bills also now have dedicated vocabulary in schema.org, see the new Invoice type for details. This addresses situations when an invoice is received that is not directly attached to an Order, for example utility bills.

As usual then release notes page has full details. In recent weeks we have been taking care to document the status of all schema.org open issues and proposals in our issue tracker on the Github site. As always, thanks are due to everyone who contributed to this release and to the ongoing discussions in Github and at W3C. 

Schema.org v1.92: Music, Video Games, Sports, Itemlist, breadcrumbs and more!

We are happy to announce version v1.92 of schema.org. With this update we "soft launch" a substantial collection of improvements that will form the basis for a schema.org version 2.0 release in early 2015. There remain a number of site-wide improvements, bugfixes and clarifications that we'd like to make before we feel ready to use the name "v2.0". However the core vocabulary improvements are stable and available for use from today. As usual see the release notes page for details.

Please get in touch via the W3C Web Schemas group or our Github issue tracker if you'd like to share feedback with us and the wider schema.org community. We won't go into the details of each update in today's blog post, but there are a lot of additions and fixes, and more coming in 2015. Many thanks to all those who contributed to this release!

Schema.org v1.91: Offer/price documentation fixes, cleanup and community contributions.

Schema.org has been updated to v1.91.

From the release notes:

• Updated text of the price property to include practical usage guidance, alongside links to information from GS1 for the gtin-related Offer properties.
• Updated all our examples to follow that guidance; primarily by using priceCurrency and the content= attribute.
• Noted our thanks to the OpenDomain project for our domain name.
• Updated the text of the 'image' property to match its expected types. Thanks, Dan Scott!
• Changed spelling of 'supercededBy' to the more conventional supersededBy. Thanks, Sachini Aparna Herath!
• Noted that 'logo' and 'photo' are sub-properties of 'image'. Thanks, Sachini Aparna Herath, again!
• Fixed two syntax errors in examples (Store opening hours RDFa; Book, PublicationVolume Microdata). Thanks, Gregg Kellogg!
• Added Tolkien-based examples for exampleOfWork/workExample. Thanks, Dan Scott, again!
• Fixed a bug with our UTF-8 support. Thanks, Richard Wallis!

See the releases page in our documentation for details of previous updates.

Schema.org Support for Bibliographic Relationships and Periodicals

[Guest post by Richard Wallis, OCLC & Dan Scott, Laurentian University]
With the addition of three new types, the latest version of schema.org introduces support for describing the relationship between, Articles and the Periodicals in which they were published, along with potentially related PublicationIssues & PublicationVolumes. For example:

• The article "The semantic web" was published in May 2001, in volume 284, issue 5 of Scientific american on pages 28 through 37.
• That issue of Scientific American contained 33 other articles listed at http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v284/n5/index.html.
• The editors for that issue included Mark Alpert, Steve Ashley, and Carol Ezzell.

You can now also describe creative works that span multiple parts using the hasPart and isPartOf properties, and you can express relationships between a conceptual representation of a creative work and physical examples of that work using the exampleOfWork and workExample properties. For example:

• The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy consisting of three separate books.
• One edition of the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published by HarperCollins in 1974 with ISBN .
• Another edition of the first book was published by Ballantine Books in 1984 with ISBN 0345296052.
• The movie J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi and released in 1978, was based on the first book in the trilogy.
• The movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson and released in 2001, was also based on the first book in the trilogy.

These extensions were developed by the W3C Schema Bib Extend Community Group, and were designed in the spirit of schema.org to provide an easily published and widely consumable vocabulary for creative works. Many other modelling and vocabulary initiatives, such as RDA and BIBFRAME, continue to work towards offering the additional layers of granularity of description desired by many in the bibliographic metadata world, and these schema.org extensions hope to complement those efforts. Where possible, we aligned our work with the Bibliographic Ontology, and acknowledge their leadership in tackling many of these issues.

We are pleased with the outcome of working with the broader W3C Web Schemas Task Force community to refine these extensions, which also helped address similar concepts and relationships required by a number of associated domains such as TV, Radio and Music Recording. One outcome of this discussion was the elevation of position to a general superproperty of properties such as issueNumber, volumeNumber, seasonNumber, and episodeNumber. Combined with the recent addition of the Role type, schema.org now has the flexible, generic framework to address the specialized needs of other domains such as Comics.

We welcome the acceptance, refinement and introduction of these proposals by schema.org, which greatly enhances the capability for describing creative works in general, and bibliographic resources in particular.

Introducing 'Role'

To date, schema.org has supported relatively simple relations between entities.  For example, if we wanted to describe Joe Montana as an athlete on the San Francisco 49ers team, we might represent this using the newly proposed "athlete" property of a SportsTeam. 

This is a pretty clear structure, but it doesn't offer anywhere to attach further information about the relationship.  Building on our example, let's say we wanted to also indicate that Joe Montana only played for the San Francisco 49ers from 1979 to 1992 and that his position was "Quarterback".

To accomplish this, we introduce a new type called Role.  The new Role type serves to elaborate or qualify these more simple relationships. We have been motivated by concrete problems around organizational affiliations such as those occurring in music and sports. In both cases it is important to specify time periods in a sporting or musical career.

To specify the role being played, the Role entity reuses the initial property from, and then extends the semantics of the relationship by way of additional properties like "startDate".

In essence, we are replacing the "athlete" property's original value (a Person node) with an intermediary node (Role). The original node is moved one hop away and becomes the value of the re-used "athlete" property. After considering several designs, we chose this approach as the simplest.

The Role schema allows algorithms to collapse down to the simple graph from a more complicated Role-based description. In the example above, we can assume Joe Montana is a valid value for the "athlete" property on the 49ers SportsTeam. More formally, if some Role R has incoming property P from entity A, and A also has an outgoing occurrence of property P to entity B, we can assume it is reasonable to describe A as having a 'P' property whose value is B.

These details are more important to consumers of schema.org than publishers, as they allow for backwards compatibility, while also permitting any schema.org property to be used with roles.

The Role type (much like URL) can be used with any schema.org types. We will not clutter the site with statements emphasizing this, except in cases (e.g. around sports and music) where the Role mechanism is particularly useful. We have added examples of Role usage in Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD notation to the site, and look forward to seeing more detailed schema.org descriptions using this mechanism.

As we continue to evolve the site we expect to add more properties and sub-types that have been designed to work with the Role type. For now, we introduce two kinds of Role: OrganizationRole and PerformanceRole. In the sporting example shown above, the Role node (the red circle) would be an OrganizationRole and in addition to defining the "startDate" and "endDate" for that role, we might also define indicate Joe Montana was a quarterback by using the "namesPosition" property. Similarly, the PerformanceRole type provides a characterName property that might be used to describe Bill Murray's role in Ghostbusters. The Role pattern works here too. See the schema.org site for full RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD markup, including the Ghostbusters example shown here:

---
Vicki Tardif Holland (Google)
Jason Johnson (Microsoft)

Schema.org v1.4 update: examples, examples, examples...

We've just posted an update to the schema.org site, focussing on improved examples. Our last update introduced a new property called workPerformed which relates an Event to a CreativeWork performed at the event. Today's improvements add examples of this property to MusicEvent and TheaterEvent.

There are also new JSON-LD examples for MusicEvent, alongside additions showing RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD examples for various local business-related types including Restaurant, Store, Pharmacy, Corporation, PostalAddress,  Organization, ContactPoint and OpeningHoursSpecification. This update also includes improvements to the navigation for MedicalEnumeration types, alongside fixes for several other typos and glitches - both of which are thanks to Dan Scott.

Finally, it's worth highlighting the recent addition of substantial vocabulary for describing Reservations, as well as a type for describing an EmailMessage. These complement the schema.org Actions design announced last month.

Announcing Schema.org Actions

When we launched schema.org almost 3 years ago, our main focus was on providing vocabularies for describing entities --- people, places, movies, restaurants, ... But the Web is not just about static descriptions of entities. It is about taking action on these entities --- from making a reservation to watching a movie to commenting on a post.

Today, we are excited to start the next chapter of schema.org and structured data on the Web by introducing vocabulary that enables websites to describe the actions they enable and how these actions can be invoked.

The new actions vocabulary is the result of over two years of intense collaboration and debate amongst the schema.org partners and the larger Web community. Many thanks to all those who participated in these discussions, in particular to members of the Web Schemas and Hydra groups at W3C. We are hopeful that these additions to schema.org will help unleash new categories of applications.

Jason Douglas,
Sam Goto (Google)

Steve Macbeth, 

Jason Johnson (Microsoft)

Alexander Shubin (Yandex)

Peter Mika (Yahoo)

To learn more, see the overview document or Action, potentialAction and EntryPoint on schema.org.

Schema.org Sports Vocabulary

The Schema.org partners, in collaboration with experts from the BBC and IPTC/SportsML, are pleased to share a proposal for improving the Schema.org sports vocabulary.  The proposal includes support for describing sports organizations, athletes, and events, with a focus on the most common sports types being published on the Web today. Although the proposal includes support for describing sports statistics within these domains, the initial set of properties are limited to those which are broadly applicable.  More detailed, sport-specific statistics will be the subject of future additions to the base statistic classes.

The Schema.org sports vocabulary proposal is available as an exported PDF in the W3C Web Schemas - Sports wiki and a machine readable version of the schema will be posted soon.  We encourage the web community to review and provide feedback via the wiki, the W3C public vocabs mailing list (public-vocabs@w3.org), or by joining the Schema.org sports vocabulary discussion group.