Schema.

org is a collaborative community activity with a mission to "create,

maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web
pages, in email messages, and beyond."[1] Webmasters use this shared
vocabulary to structure metadata on their websites and to help search
engines understand the published content, a technique known as search
engine optimization.

Schema.org

Year started 2011

Organization Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Yandex

Base standards URI, HTML5, RDF, Microdata, ISO 8601

Related standards RDFa, Microformat, RDFS, OWL, N-Triples, Turtle,

JSON, JSON-LD, CSV

Domain Semantic Web

License CC-BY-SA 3.0

Abbreviation schema

Website schema.org

History

Schema.org is an initiative launched on June 2, 2011 by Bing, Google and

Yahoo![2][3][4] (operators of the world's largest search engines at that time)[5] to
create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on
web pages. In November 2011, Yandex (whose search engine is the largest in
Russia) joined the initiative.[6][7] They propose using the schema.org
vocabulary along with the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats[8] to mark up
website content with metadata about itself. Such markup can be recognized
by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus granting access to the
meaning of the sites (see Semantic Web). The initiative also describes an
extension mechanism for adding additional properties.[9] Public discussion of
the initiative largely takes place on the W3C public vocabularies mailing
list.[10]
In 2012, the GoodRelations ontology was integrated into Schema.org.[11]

Much of the vocabulary on Schema.org was inspired by earlier formats, such

as microformats, FOAF, and OpenCyc.[12] Microformats, with its most
dominant representative hCard, continue (as of 2015) to be published widely
on the web, where the deployment of Schema.org has strongly increased
between 2012 and 2014.[13] In 2015,[14] Google began supporting the JSON-
LD format, and as of September, 2017 recommended using JSON-LD for
structured data whenever possible.[15] [16]

Despite the clear advantages of using Schema.org, adoption continues to be

relatively poor. A survey in 2016 of 300 US-based marketing agencies and B2C
advertisers across industries showing only 17% uptake. [17]

Such validators as the Google Structured Data Testing Tool,[18] Yandex

Microformat validator,[19] and Bing Markup Validator[20] can be used to test the
validity of the data marked up with the schemas and Microdata. More
recently, Google Search Console (formerly webmaster tools) has provided a
report section for unparsable structured data. If any Schema code on a
website is incorrect, it will show in this report [21].

Some schema markups such as Organization and Person are used to

influence Google's Knowledge Graph results.[22]

Examples

Microdata

The following is an example[23] of how to mark up information about a movie

and its director using the Schema.org schemas and microdata. In order to
mark up the data, the attribute itemtype along with the URL of the
schema is used. The attribute itemscope defines the scope of the
itemtype. The kind of the current item can be defined by using the attribute
itemprop .

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

<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
<div itemprop="director" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span>
 (born <time itemprop="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-
16">August 16, 1954</time>)
</div>
<span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
<a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"
itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

RDFa 1.1 Lite

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Movie">

<h1 property="name">Avatar</h1>
<div property="director" typeof="Person">
Director: <span property="name">James Cameron</span>
(born <time property="birthDate" datetime="1954-08-
16">August 16, 1954</time>)
</div>
<span property="genre">Science fiction</span>
<a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"
property="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

JSON-LD

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org/",
"@type": "Movie",
"name": "Avatar",
"director":
{
"@type": "Person",
"name": "James Cameron",
"birthDate": "1954-08-16"
},
"genre": "Science fiction",
"trailer": "../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"
 }
</script>

References

1. "About schema.org initiative" . W3C. Retrieved 28 June 2018.

2. "Home - schema.org" . schema.org. Retrieved 2019-04-01.

3. Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web ,

Google blog, 2 June 2011

4. Introducing Schema.org: Bing, Google and Yahoo Unite to Build the Web of
Objects , Bing blog, 2 June 2011

5. "Top 5 Search Engines from Oct to Dec 10" . StatCounter. Retrieved

17 January 2011.

6. nate451. "Yandex joins Google, Yahoo! and Bing to collaborate on Schema.org

- TechCrunch" . Retrieved 6 July 2017.

7. "Yandex now supports schema.org markup" . blog.schema.org. Retrieved

6 July 2017.

8. "Getting Started - schema.org" . schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.

9. "Extending Schemas" . schema.org. 2011-06-02. Retrieved 2 June 2011.

10. "W3C web vocabularies mailing list" . w3.org. 2013-07-22. Retrieved 22 July
2013.

11. "Good Relations and Schema.org" . blog.schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.

12. "FAQ" . schema.org. Retrieved 2 June 2011.

13. "Web Data Commons – RDFa, Microdata, and Microformat Data Sets --
Extracting Structured Data from the Common Web Crawl" . 3.1. Extraction
Results from the December 2014 Common Crawl Corpus. 2015-04-13.
Retrieved 2015-04-13.

14. "Easier website development with Web Components and JSON-LD" . 2015-
03-09.

15. "Introduction to Structured Data" . 2017-09-13.

16. "How to add Schema Markup Data JSON-LD" . 2019-09-06.

17. "Prioritize Search To Maximize ROI Of Marketing" (PDF). 2017-01-01.

18. "Structured Data Testing Tool" . www.google.com. Retrieved 6 July 2017.

19. "Микроразметка — Яндекс.Вебмастер" . webmaster.yandex.ru. Retrieved
6 July 2017.

20. "Bing - Markup Validator" . www.bing.com. Retrieved 6 July 2017.

21. "What is Schema Mark Up and How Can it Benefit Your Business" . 2019-12-
04.

22. "Specify your social profiles to Google" . Google Developers. Retrieved

2015-06-25.

23. "Getting Started - schema.org" . schema.org. Retrieved 6 July 2017.

External links

Homepage URL: https://schema.org