Q: What do Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Yandex, the New York Times, and The Walt Disney Company have in common?

A: schema.org

On June 2, 2011, schema.org was launched with little fanfare, but it quickly received a lot of attention. Now, almost exactly one year later, we have assembled a panel of experts from the organizations listed above to discuss what has happened since and what we have to look forward to as the vocabulary continues to grow and evolve, including up-to-the-minute news and announcements. The panel will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Moderated by Ivan Herman, the Semantic Web Activity Lead for the World Wide Web Consortium, the panel includes representatives from each of the core search engines involved in schema.org, and two of the largest early implementers: The New York Times and Disney. Among the topics we will discuss will be the value proposition of using schema.org markup, publishing techniques and syntaxes, vocabularies that have been mapped to schema.org, current tools and applications, existing implementations, and a look forward at what is planned and what is needed to encourage adoption and consumption.

Panelists:

	Moderator: Ivan Herman Semantic Web Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium		Dan Brickley Contractor, schema.org at Google
	John Giannandrea Director Engineering, Google		Peter Mika Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
	Alexander Shubin Product Manager, Head of Strategic Direction, Yandex		Mike Van Snellenberg Principal Program Manager, Microsoft/Bing
	Evan Sandhaus Semantic Technologist, New York Times Company		Jeffrey W. Preston SEO Manager, Disney Interactive Media Group

These panelists, along with the rest of the more than 120 speakers from SemTechBiz, will be on-hand to answer audience questions and discuss the latest work in Semantic Technologies. You can join the discussion by registering for SemTechBiz – San Francisco today (and save $200 off the onsite price)

 

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Evan Sandhaus reports for the New York Times that rNews has finally arrived. He explains, “On January 23rd, 2012, The Times made a subtle change to articles published on nytimes.com. We rolled out phase one of our implementation of rNews – a new standard for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata into HTML documents. Many of our users will never see the change but the change will likely impact how they experience the news. Far beneath the surface of nytimes.com lurk the databases — databases of articles, metadata and images, databases that took tremendous effort to develop, databases that the world only glimpses through the dark lens of HTML.” Read more

[UPDATE - November 9, 2011: the IPTC rNews version 1.0 documentation is now available.]

Today (Oct. 7, 2011), at a gathering of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), rNews took the step from being a proposal to being a formal standard. rNews was created by the IPTC and made its public debut earlier this year as a proposal for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents.

Congratulations to the IPTC and the leaders of the rNews standardization effort: Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Evan Sandhaus (New York Times), and Stuart Myles (Associated Press).

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When it comes to schema.org, there’s some good news – and some ‘eh’ news.

Let’s start with the positive stuff. Today at the schema blog, the news was released that schema.org has added to its NewsArticle and related types such as CreativeWork new properties for mark-up based on the rNews standard from the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

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The New York Times has launched a new platform called beta620 for testing and collaborating on experimental NYT projects. “For years,” the article notes, “the NYT’s systems and technology team has had a blog, Open, where they’ve shared data and coding projects with the public. But Open primarily targeted other developers, particularly those using the NYT’s data APIs to build their own tools. beta620 is aimed at nytimes.com’s broader readership. It’s a chance to test how new prototypes work, generate community input, figure out how they can best add value to the company, and build and iterate on the fly.” Read more

Last week, our own Jennifer Zaino reported on a new standard being adopted by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), called rNews (rNews 0.1, to be exact).

Last night, at the New York Times Building in Manhattan, the Lotico New York City Semantic Web Meetup group was introduced to rNews.  Presenting to the group were Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Stuart Myles (Associated Press), and Evan Sandhaus (New York Times).

By all reports, it sounds like rNews was very well received, and there were several takeaways from the evening.  At one point, Stuart Myles offered seven concrete ideas for ways in which rNews could be used. Read more

News publishing outlets stand to benefit from adopting Semantic Web technologies, and now there’s a lightweight way for them to begin moving in that direction, too.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) recently introduced rNews 0.1, a set of specifications and best practices for using RDFa to embed news-specific metadata (headlines, bylines, publication dates and so on) into HTML documents. It hopes rNews will become a standard in the industry for conveying through to browsers and into HTML documents the deep structure and explicitly modeled content that exists in publishers’ back-end data layers. The wider its adoption across news channels, the greater the chance of innovative apps cropping up that can help publishers increase engagement with their audiences, according to rNews’ developers.

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On Friday, April 8, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the fourth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. Joining them this month were two special guests to discuss the impact of Semantic Web in Media and publishing: Mike Dunn from Hearst Interactive Media and Evan Sandhaus from the New York Times Company. Read more

A new article highlighting interviews with Evan Sandhaus, the lead architect for semantic platforms at the New York Times, and Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics, takes a look at the effect of the semantic web on news and social media.

First examining news media, the article comments that “while webpages are formatted for humans to easily read them, machines can’t easily determine the underlying meaning of content on a page if it doesn’t follow a consistent structure.” Read more

There were a lot of articles and blog postings written about the Semantic Technology Conference. Below is a list of those we are aware of.  If you know of others, feel free to send them to us at info (at) semanticuniverse.com so we can add them to this list.

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