Schema.org support for job postings

We’re happy to announce that schema.org, working together with the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy, has added support for marking up job postings on the web.

Leveraging this markup, the US Veterans administration has created a search widget that is accessible across a growing number of federal websites including nrd.gov and whitehouse.gov, to find job listings from veteran-committed employers.

We feel privileged to have played a role in enabling this. More details can be found in the US CTO, Aneesh Chopra’s post on the White House Blog.

R.V. Guha

Google

Yandex now supports schema.org markup

One of the primary goals in creating schema.org was to simplify structured data markup requirements for content creators across search engines, which we hope will drive greater adoption across the Web. In that vein, we're very happy that Yandex has announced its support for schema.org. In addition to being a major consumer of schema.org markup, Yandex will be increasingly contributing to discussions about the evolution of the schema on the W3C-hosted Web Schemas group, and they are also investigating translation of the schema.org website to local languages. It's great to have growing support for the schema.org markup around the world!

W3C "Web Schemas" group is our new public feedback forum

Our Discussion Group will be moving to the W3C forum, which will use the public-vocabs@w3.org mailing list.

The Schema.org Google Group will not be completely shut down, however we do encourage all discussion of vocabulary, schema and deployment practicalities to move to public-vocabs@w3.org mailing list. These are also linked from the Documents page.

This comes out of a plan for closer collaboration between Schema.org and other related efforts. The Web standards organization W3C has created two related task forces of its Semantic Web Interest Group that are relevant for Schema.org. One is devoted to the technicalities of syntax and other one, "Web Schemas" is for vocabulary discussions. We have decided to adopt this forum as a new home for Schema.org feedback, since it provides a natural connection point to related efforts from other groups and communities.

The W3C group is open to all, and will have a Wiki and issue tracker to help organize feedback; not only for Schema.org but for other Web Schemas who are interested to collaborate. We hope this will give rise to collaborations, mappings and shared modeling styles.

Looking forward to greater opportunities for collaboration.

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

Extended schema.org news support

We’re happy to announce that schema.org has significantly expanded its support for marking up news articles, based on the rNews standard created by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

New properties have been added to NewsArticle as well as other related types such as CreativeWork. For example, you can now specify a dateline for an article or provide information tying the online article to a printed version, such as the newspaper section and page where the article appeared. In addition, support for user comments is being added, applicable to news articles as well as a variety of other item types.

In collaboration with members of the IPTC including Evan Sandhaus (Lead Architect, Semantic Platforms at the New York Times), Stuart Myles (Deputy Director of Schema Standards at The Associated Press and Lead of the Semantic Web Working Group), and Andreas Gebhard (Managing Editor at Getty Images and Member of the IPTC Board of Directors), we’ve added news/publishing properties and aligned them with the IPTC rNews standard. Given IPTC’s reach developing technical standards on behalf of over 60 news agencies, this is an exciting partnership between search engines and content creators.

Making news metadata on the web machine readable in a standard way opens up new opportunities for innovation for both publishers and consumers of news. We look forward to seeing increased markup and interesting new applications of this data in the future.

Kavi Goel
Google

On June 2^nd we announced a collaboration between Bing, Google and Yahoo to create and support a standard set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Although our companies compete in many ways, it was evident to us that collaboration in this space would be good for each search engine individually and for the industry as a whole.

In the short time since the announcement we’ve received a lot of great feedback. We have participated in some conferences and we have seen a lot of discussion about our proposal on the web. We’ve also seen the Association of Educational Publishers publically announce their intention to build an industry specific extension! We’re genuinely pleased to see so much interest in the topic as it is very important to the work we do.

We have been reading all of the feedback, following the discussions and debating amongst our working group many of the concerns and suggestions that have been raised. We have not been able to respond to all of the feedback, but we have incorporated some of it into our site already and we will continue to iterate on that.

Going forward, this blog will serve as a vehicle for the team to share our thoughts, solicit feedback, announce schema updates and so on.

In that spirit, I'm happy to announce that we will be hosting a schema.org workshop to take place on September 21^st in Silicon Valley. As a group we are deeply committed to working with the standards communities, tools vendors and organizations committed to driving industry specific extensions so we hope this workshop will be the first of many successful collaborations.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be reaching out to the leaders in the appropriate standards communities, amongst the tools vendors and in the vertical industries where extensions make the most sense inviting them to participate. This will be a working session – taking feedback, discussing options and figuring out the best way to incorporate it to make this simple and useful for publishers and the search engines. If you would like to be involved please send an email to workshop@schema.org.

We are really looking forward to these discussions and we will share what we learn here on this blog. In the meantime, please continue to share your feedback.

Thanks again!

Michael O’Connor
Bing