Schema.org for TV and Radio markup

[guest post by Yves Raimond, BBC Research & Development.]

The new version of schema.org includes the TV and radio extension we have been working on with Jean-Pierre Evain (EBU) and Dan Brickley (for schema.org). This update offers improved support for describing TV and radio shows, for example:

• 'The Hungry Earth' is the 8th episode of the 5th season of Doctor Who
• It is broadcast on BBC One London at 18:15, on the 22nd of May 2010
• It is available on BBC iPlayer for two weeks after that

Embedding such data in web pages means that it can be aggregated by search engines, which can then provide more information around TV and radio search results, as well as providing instant answers to queries such as 'when is the next Eastenders episode on?'. We built on previous efforts in modelling such information, such as TV Anytime, EBU Core and the BBC Programmes Ontology. The RDFa definition from which the extension was built in schema.org has equivalence links to concepts in these ontologies.

This update also maintains backwards-compatibility with previously existing concepts (e.g. TVEpisode, TVSeries and TVSeason) and properties.

The concepts related to this update are the following:

• Series (e.g. 'Doctor Who')
• Season (e.g. 'Doctor Who, Season 5')
• Episode (e.g. 'Doctor Who, Season 5, The Hungry Earth')
• Clip (e.g. 'Clip from The Hungry Earth')
• RadioSeries, RadioSeason, RadioEpisode and RadioClip, their radio-specific sub-classes (e.g. ‘20th of November 2013 episode of the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4)
• TVSeries, TVSeason, TVEpisode and TVClip, their TV-specific sub-classes
• PublicationEvent, a publication of an episode or a clip, for example a broadcast or an availability on a catch-up service.
• BroadcastEvent, e.g. 'The Hungry Earth is broadcast on BBC One London at 18:15, on the 22nd of May 2010'
• OnDemandEvent, e.g. 'The Hungry Earth is available on BBC iPlayer for two weeks after broadcast'
• BroadcastService, e.g. 'BBC One London belongs to the BBC One parent service'
• broadcaster, e.g. ‘the BBC’

Of course, this extension is just the beginning at better support for broadcast and media-related data. We focused on basic information and fixing a few issues in the first schema.org release for the time being, but there are more areas to explore. As consensus builds around them, possible extensions could also be proposed to schema.org or published directly in RDFa as extension markup using existing vocabularies such as the ones published by the EBU or the BBC. This include for example support for segmentation (tracklists, chapters, etc.) and their links to media fragments, more detailed contributor/character information (e.g. 'David Tennant plays the Xth Doctor in this episode') and the description of multiple video, audio and data tracks (e.g. ‘This episode has two audio tracks, one in French and one in English’).

Regardless of any future improvements, schema.org's TV and Radio vocabulary now provides a stable basis for Web sites to share rich descriptions of TV/Radio content. See schema.org's full listing of vocabularies to see this work in its wider context.

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.

Schema.org at ISWC 2013 conference

Various members of the W3C Web Schemas group (where we collaborate on improvements to schema.org) are at the International Semantic Web conference in Sydney this week. If you're at the conference, we've arranged for an ad-hoc vocabulary collaboration room to be available on thursday and friday. Feel free to make use of the room during those times for any discussions around Web Schemas, schema.org and related technologies, and to the W3C wiki to suggest topics... 

The room is BAYSIDE 201, available any time during Thursday morning (08:30-11:40), Thursday afternoon (14:40-18:00), or Friday morning (8:30-11:40). Several members of the schema.org team will also be at R.V.Guha's keynote on wednesday morning. Hope to see you there!

Vocabulary for describing Civic Services

When people are in need of government services, they often turn to search engines, but the top result may not be for the service of interest. A new vocabulary, similar to the European Commission ISA Core Public Service vocabulary, has been proposed to improve search engines’ understanding of these services. It is intended to provide enough information to determine the service, the area covered by the service, and relevant information for using the service. The Civic Services proposal is available from W3C's Wiki; any future updates and status reports will be made available in the same way.

We are always open to ideas for expanding schema.org's descriptive vocabulary. Day-to-day public discussion of such extensions happens in the W3C WebSchemas group, using a combination of e-mail and Wiki pages to explore new schema ideas. However we are aware that not everyone will follow those detailed discussions, and it is often important to get wider review of proposed schemas. The full Civic Services proposal (see full PDF) gives details of scope and markup examples - currently the focus is on describing the availability of services, and on various kinds of permit. The vocabulary is designed to integrate with other aspects of schema.org, e.g. our medical/health and Audience vocabularies, as well as the mechanisms for describing opening hours and locations shared by various kinds of local business and government office. An example HTML snippet describing a hotline, including the languages offered and provider is available in the WebSchemas Wiki at W3C.

Schema.org would like to encourage review and commentary around this new proposed vocabulary; in particular we would like to hear from potential publishers of such data from around the world. Comments are welcomed here, in the W3C Wiki, by public email to public-vocabs@w3.org (preferred) or to schema-org-contact@googlegroups.com. 

Schema.org and JSON-LD

We'd like to take a minute to share our enthusiasm for some recent work at W3C: JSON-LD.

Schema.org is all about shared vocabulary - it helps integrate data across applications, Web sites and data formats. We are adding JSON-LD to the list of formats we recommend for use with schema.org, alongside Microdata and RDFa - each has strengths and weaknesses for different usage scenarios.

In HTML, schema.org descriptions can be written using markup attributes in HTML (i.e. RDFa and Microdata). However there are often cases when data is exchanged in pure JSON or as JSON within HTML. W3C's work on JSON-LD provides mechanisms for interpreting structured data in JSON that promotes interoperability with other data formats. We believe it provides value for developers and publishers, and improves the flow of information between JSON and other environments.

There are some technical details to work through on how exactly schema.org terms are defined for JSON-LD usage, but it is already clear that JSON-LD is a useful contribution to structured data sharing in the Web. Many thanks to the hardworking W3C community for creating the specification.

Good Relations and Schema.org

Today, we are pleased to announce that we are integrating e-commerce schemas from the  GoodRelations project into Schema.org. The addition of these widely adopted schemas into schema.org will make it more easy for Web publishers to express structured data about products, offers, companies, stores and related facts.

Schema.org was designed as a platform where the Web community can come together and share structured schemas that improve the ability for search engines to understand the content of Web pages. Our collaboration with GoodRelations exemplifies this: GoodRelations provides a rich, well known and widely used terminology for e-commerce data sharing. By integrating GoodRelations into schema.org, we make it easier for publishers to adopt, and also combine such vocabulary. Just as with IPTC rNews previously, and many other collaborations, our approach has been to bring together existing work in a way that hides multi-schema complexity behind a common datamodel. 

Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features. Enumerated lists of values remain managed at GoodRelations URLs, following our general approach for referencing 'external enumerations'.

Integrating these schemas has involved making a few decisions, and we welcome all feedback on the approach taken here. In order to have consistent naming conventions between schema.org and GoodRelations, some terms were given new names for use within schema.org. There are also a few cases where existing schema.org vocabulary differed in terminology or 'level of detail' with GoodRelations. We will continue to improve our documentation, examples and FAQ to make clearer the new expressivity that these additions bring. But we wanted to share this progress as early as possible, since it provides an important step forward for structured data and e-commerce on the Web.

Good Relations has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 and continues as an ongoing project. We look forward to seeing it reach new audiences via schema.org.

R.V. Guha

Google

Describing Datasets with schema.org

Earlier this year, we received a proposal for a 'Datasets' addition to schema.org, via the Web Schemas group at W3C. Based on informal conversations with various potential publishers and consumers, this work has great potential and we would like to invite interested parties to take a detailed look at the proposal, to identify any implementation issues or potential improvements.  It is a small but useful vocabulary and the wiki overview also includes a summary of its relationship to related initiatives from the Linked Data community. More details and demos are also available from RPI.

As with all such proposals, it is listed in our Wiki area and we encourage comments and discussion on the public-vocabs@w3.org mailing list. As schema.org grows into more specialist areas, we are aware that we can't expect everyone to join one big mailing list. In particular for this Datasets vocabulary, which is particularly relevant to the community around open government and public-sector data, we want to take care to solicit comments from potential publishers. As always, comments are welcomed in the public W3C-hosted mailing list and Wiki, via blog discussions, or if you prefer, by direct email to the schema.org team.

This topic is particularly exciting due to the huge number of datasets that have been made public in recent years. While each dataset may ultimately be expressed in detailed, domain-specific form (e.g. using specific scientific or statistical schemas), the Datasets proposal focuses on the high level common characteristics that are shared across thousands of otherwise diverse datasets.

So what are the next steps with this vocabulary?  We would like to hear from publishers of such datasets, to confirm what we've been hearing anecdotally, which is that such an extension to schema.org would be useful, used and a good fit to the available metadata.

As always with schema.org, the hard work is in building and demonstrating rough consensus around a design. This week's post on the data.gov site from Chris Musialek is an important step in that direction, and we welcome comments from others that will help us move things forward. From Chris's post:

We've been watching the schema.org datasets schema space for a while now, as Data.gov is very interested in adding schema.org support for our listing of over 450,000 datasets. We think this will help the major search engines create better relevance rankings of Federal government data, where many searches begin.

We wanted to come out publicly saying that we've reviewed the current datasets schema proposal in draft, and we are comfortable with the current state of things. There is definitely work still left to do, but there seems to be pretty solid agreement on everything but the details, which seem very resolvable. At this point, if the group would solidify on the dataset proposal, then Data.gov would support and use it.

Many thanks to Chris for opening the conversation about this work. If you have feedback on any aspect of the Datasets proposal, do please share your experience...

Health and Medical vocabulary for schema.org

We are pleased to announce a major set of additions to schema.org that improve our coverage of health and medical topics. Although there are many existing efforts around structured data for health and medicine, such structure is today typically available only 'behind the scenes' rather than shared in the Web using standard markup. Our design goals therefore differed from many previous initiatives, in that we focused on markup for use by Webmasters and publishers. Our main goal was to create markup that will help patients, physicians, and generally health-interested consumers find relevant health information via search.

This collaborative project drew upon search expertise from the schema.org partners but also gained immeasurably through feedback from expert reviewers including the US NCBI; physicians at Harvard, Duke and other institutions, as well as from several health Web sites. Contributions from the W3C Healthcare and Lifesciences group and Web Schemas community also helped bridge the complex worlds of Web standards, search and medicine/healthcare.

A note on scope: the new health and medical schema additions are intended to cover both consumer- and professionally-targeted health and medical web content, so any given piece of content may use only the relevant subset of the schema. Also, we've focused on creating lightweight markup that easily surfaces key health and medical entities in web pages and captures the relationships between them. As such, we envision these additions as complementary to the many very good and comprehensive medical ontologies, meta-thesauri, and controlled vocabularies that have been created in the medical domain. When such resources are available, our proposed schema can link to and take advantage of them, e.g. via the code property of MedicalEntity. Finally, while today the additions are not aimed at supporting use cases like automated reasoning, medical records coding, or genomic tagging, these could be interesting domains for future extension.

The Web contains a wealth of information on health and medicine and we hope this contribution will make it easier for users (whether patients, consumers, physicians or family members) to make the most of the information that is shared in the Web. For interested parties we have prepared a more detailed overview document. As with all schema.org vocabulary, we will continue to evolve the schema and welcome your feedback, suggestions and implementation experience here, via W3C, or by mail.

-- Aaron Brown, Google
-- C. Michael Gibson, MD, Wikidoc

New Vocabularies for Technical Publishing

Three new vocabularies have been proposed as the result of a collaborative effort by several Technology companies. They are specifically for use with Technical Articles, API reference documentation, and Code.

These proposed vocabularies will improve search engines’ understanding of documentation with technical content, and thus greatly increase the discoverability of this documentation.

The following snippets highlight the potential of these new vocabularies.

TechArticle

Informs which product version the content is referring to

This content is for version 4; and the current version is 4.5.

<meta itemprop="aboutProduct" content=".Net Framework 4.0" />

<meta itemprop="currentProduct" content=".Net Framework 4.5" />

Informs where to get more information on the overall concept

This content on “Hyper-V Server 8 Beta” is about the broader concept of virtualization:

<span itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">

<meta itemprop="name" content="Virtualization"/>

<metaitemprop="url" content="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/virtualization"/>

</span>

Maps content to the audience’s intent

This is content that describes how to do something:

itemprop="genre" content="How-to"

This content describes steps for troubleshooting:

itemprop="genre" content="Troubleshooting"

APIReference

Disambiguates version and usage

This content refers to a managed assembly:
itemprop="programmingModel" content="Managed"
itemprop="assembly" content="mscorlib.dll" />

Defines platform category

This reference documentation applies to the phone platform:

itemprop="aboutProduct" content=".Net Framework 4.5"

itemprop="targetPlatform" content="phone"

This reference documentation applies to the desktop platform:

itemprop="aboutProduct" content=".Net Framework 4.5"

itemprop="targetPlatform" content="desktop"

Code

Defines section of content as sample code

This Code is a C++ sample inserted in an article:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Code">

<meta itemprop="name" content=" Allocating Memory from a NUMA Node "/>

<meta itemprop="sampleType" content=" inline"/>

<div itemprop="programmingLanguage">

C++

</div>

</div>

This is a full visual studio solution in an MSDN Code Gallery:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Code">

<meta itemprop="codeRepository" content="http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Web-Authentication-d0485122/view/SourceCode" />

<meta itemprop="sampleType" content="Visual Studio solution(SLN)" />

</div>

We would like this community’s feedback concerning the above proposals. 

Thanks!

Charlie Jiang and Kenley Lamaute

SemTech, RDFa, Microdata and more...

Schema.org was launched a year ago. This week several of the schema.org team returned to the SemTechBiz conference for a panel to discuss where we are, and where we're going.

Schema.org is all about shared vocabulary, rather than any specific markup encoding. As we reported last year, the RDFa Working Group have been working hard to address feedback from schema.org and others. Yesterday's panel gave us the chance to be the first to welcome W3C's announcement that RDFa 1.1 is now a full W3C recommendation. This new standard, in particular the RDFa Lite specification, brings together the simplicity of Microdata with improved support for using multiple schemas together.

What does this mean for schema.org? We want to say clearly that we continue to support Microdata, and in particular those who have championed the adoption of Microdata over the last year. Billions of pages now use schema.org markup thanks to these early adopters, and Microdata continues to be a fine way to publish and share structured data. Our approach is "Microdata and more". As implementations and services begin to consume RDFa 1.1, publishers with an interest in mixing schema.org with additional vocabularies, or who are using tools like Drupal 7, may find RDFa well worth exploring.

Beyond Microdata and RDFa in HTML, the SemTechBiz conference covered numerous other ways of sharing schema.org structured data. Examples included JSON-LD, the use of schema.org with DocBook XML (via RDFa), and W3C's relational database mapping technology.

We are also pleased to announce today a discussion paper on the use of OData and Schema.org, posted in the Web Schemas wiki. OData defines a RESTful interface for working with data on the Web. The newest version of OData allows service developers and third parties to annotate data or metadata exposed by an OData Service. Defining common OData Vocabulary encodings of the schema.org schemas facilitates the understanding and even transformation of data across these different encodings.

But what of the schema itself? The largest change so far was the integration of the IPTC/rNews vocabulary. Building on this model, we have been encouraging public collaboration, discussion and debate on schemas via the W3C Web Schemas community. Aside from the addition of JobPosting, numerous small improvements and fixes, including a new Comment type and a more detailed schema for SoftwareApplication, we have been preparing for a '1.0' release later this month. We maintain a public list of proposals under community discussion, and will typically incorporate vocabulary when we see a combination of interest from major publishers and consumers alongside rough consensus on the schema design.

The schema.org 1.0 vocabulary is expected to include substantial additions including support for genealogy (via historical-data.org), e-commerce (through collaboration with Good Relations), Learning / Education (with LRMI), a Medical/health vocabulary, additions for describing technical/code and API documentation, and for improved modeling of TV/Radio content. Discussion is also underway around Sports, Forums, and numerous other topics. For each of these, the W3C Wiki is the best place to start, and to contribute. Sometimes proposers or community members will use other mailing lists, Github or elsewhere, but the Wiki and mailing list are the main focus of shared discussions.

You can read full details of each work-in-progress, or follow this blog for news of new vocabulary. While we will continue to extend schema.org throughout the year (e.g. we expect IPTC will complete rNews 1.1 around October) we are also well aware that we can't cover everything. SemTech gave us the chance to discuss collaboration with the Wikidata project; this should allow schema.org descriptions to draw upon the vast content of Wikipedia. This combination of the growing schema.org vocabulary with 'external enumerations' from sites like Wikipedia, alongside new syntaxes such as RDFa Lite and OData will keep us busy over the next year, and will create exciting possibilities for search, structured data and the Web.

Schema.org markup for external lists

The world is too rich, complex and interesting for a single schema to describe fully on its own. With schema.org we aim to find a balance, by providing a core schema that covers lots of situations, alongside extension mechanisms for extra detail. There are many situations where the use of existing controlled vocabularies, standards and datasets would improve schema.org markup. This is the role of the schema.org "external enumerations" mechanism.

We introduce "external enumerations" with a simple example - countries - and encourage implementors to join the schema.org community in W3C's 'Web Schemas' group where the full details are being discussed.

Each schema.org type (such as Person, PostalAddress) is associated with a set of properties, such as
"nationality", "addressCountry". In turn, each property has one or more expected types; in this case, both the "nationality" of a Person, and the "addressCountry" of a PostalAddress expect to have a Country value. Rather than adding large lists of specific countries to schema.org, instead we encourage the use of external lists.  We will publish a set of well-known authority lists, linked to the types and properties they are used with. To get started, we take simple Wikipedia links as an example of such an authority. Other more specialist examples (such as IPTC codes) will follow.

Taking our existing Movie example in Microdata, let's add nationality details for one of the actors. To do this, we simply add a link:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie">
 <h1 itemprop="name">Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (2011)</h1>
 <span itemprop="description">Jack Sparrow and Barbossa embark on[...]</span>
 <div itemprop="actor" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">

  <span itemprop="name">Johnny Depp</span>

  <link itemprop="nationality" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States"/>
 </div>
</div> 

Here we use  'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States' to stand for the specific country. Other authorities also publish useful structured data about countries and have stable URLs that could be used. For example, we could use the UN FAO's GeoPolitical Ontology, and their URL for the USA. From a schema.org perspective, we do not take account of any types and properties defined by these external sites, since it is important to support a variety of quite different authority lists, who often have different ways of modeling things. Each external authority essentially supplies a set of URI/URL item identifiers that can be dropped into schema.org markup.

We've shown here the use of Wikipedia links for identifying members of the Country type. Take a look at the detailed document for discussion on how to use this with Microdata's 'itemid' attribute, if you want to describe the Country (or other object) in further detail. The W3C wiki also gives other examples, and shows how the markup would look in RDFa Lite. 

While there are more details to work out as we start to apply this idea across schema.org, we wanted to share this initial example.  The basic idea is very simple: everywhere in schema.org where external lists will help, we will need to have a specific schema.org type (like Country), for which the external authority supplies identifiers. In some cases, we will have to add new types to support this. Beyond the basics presented here, there are various technical details of syntax, discussion of exactly which authorities and URI identifiers to use, and so on. We welcome suggestions (here or via the Web Schemas group) for existing enumerations that would be useful additions, and feedback on the general approach.

Building a Web of Objects at Yahoo!

We'd like to share a link to a recent set of presentation slides by Peter Mika, Ralph Rabbat, Philip Bohannon of Yahoo! The talk by Ralph Rabbat was part of the Industry Track during October's International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn. Slides (in .pptx format) are linked from the conference site and describe some work they're doing that relates to schema.org. This presentation covers some aspect of Yahoo's work in semantic web both from engineering and research aspect. Please, feel free to connect directly with the authors if you have any comments/questions. The other Industry Track presentations, and materials from the wider conference; are worth checking out too.

Using RDFa 1.1 Lite with Schema.org

As a result of our continued discussions and collaborations with publishers, implementers and standards-makers, we're pleased to give advance notice of a new way of adopting schema.org's structured data vocabulary. W3C's RDF Web Applications group are right now putting the finishing touches to the latest version of the RDFa standard. This work opens up new possibilities also for developers who intend to work with schema.org data using RDF-based tools and Linked Data, and defines a simplified publisher-friendly 'Lite' view of RDFa.

Early adopters can follow the in-progress drafts (rdfa-core, rdfa-lite) while the W3C group work through the remaining details. We hope that our support for 'RDFa Lite', alongside Microdata, will allow publishers to focus more on what they want to say with their data, rather than on the details of its specific encoding as markup. We also want to take a moment to thank the members of the RDFa community for taking on board our feedback; making standards is hard work, and we believe this latest version of RDFa is a major contribution to the Web of structured data.

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