schema.org Leadership Panel; L-to-R: Michael O'Connor (Microsoft), John Giannandrea (Google), Charlie Jiang (Microsoft), Kavi Goel (Google), R.V. Guha (Google), Steve MacBeth (Microsoft), Gaurav Mishra (Yahoo), Peter Mika (Yahoo)

A room full of interested parties gathered in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus yesterday to discuss Schema.org, its implications on existing vocabularies, syntaxes, and projects, and how best to move forward with what has admittedly been a bumpy road.

Schema.org, you may recall, is the vocabulary for structured data markup that was released by Google, Microsoft, and Bing on June 2 of this year.  The schema.org website states, “A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.”  (For more history about the roll-out and initial reactions to it, here’s a summary.)

Yesterday was the first time since the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco that community members have gathered face-to-face to discuss Schema.org in an open forum. It was a full agenda with plenty of opportunity for debate and discussion.

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A recent post by Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead for the W3C, takes a look at the primary discussions that have been sparked since the emergence of schema.org and what the semantic web community needs to talk about next. The first major topic of discussion, according to the article, has been, “What is the evolution path of the schema.org vocabularies; how do they relate to vocabulary developments around the world that has already brought us such widely used vocabularies like Dublin Core, GoodRelations, FOAF, vCard, the different microformat vocabularies, etc?” Read more

Facebook now supports microformats in its Download Your Information feature: “The addition provides developers with a way to parse the profile information, posts, photos and videos contained in a Facebook user’s account. Although the change doesn’t have a direct impact on what a mainstream user can do with their Facebook data – you still can’t export your Facebook contact list, for example – it’s an important step for Facebook to make in terms of loosening its formerly tight control over user data.” Read more

If you have been following the news from the world of web standards, linked data, and/or semantic web, you certainly have heard about schema.org. If you missed it, schema.org is a collaboration of Google, Yahoo! and Bing and is a way to include structured data in web pages. The vocabulary includes descriptive terms for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, locations, and more – there are over 100 terms. According to the Schema.org website, the goal is “to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.”

Announced just before The San Francisco Semantic Technology Conference, Schema.org was the most heated discussion topic the conference has seen in some time, and since then has been talked about extensively in news publications, podcasts, email discussion boards, and Q&A systems. (In case you missed all the hubub, following is a timeline of some of the early reactions.)

There is little doubt that schema.org will continue to be a topic of conversation for some time to come, but as we are now about one month in, we wanted to look in on the discussion and provide an aggregation of some of the many voices and opinions we have heard, including some very recent developments and newly available video of the Google Rich Snippets session from SemTech.

Be sure to see the bottom of this post for the latest!

Timeline

June 2 – schema.org is announced by Google, Yahoo, and Bing

June 2 – A public discussion forum is opened as a Google Group

June 2 – Mike Bergman – Structured Web Gets Massive Boost/

June 3 -  schema.rdfs.org is announced. This was a quick response from the Linked Data community “to express the terms provided by the Schema.org consortium in RDF.” Of particular interest may be the various tools that are in development by community members.

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NOTE: This podcast will be of most interest to attendees of SemTech 2011, as the bulk of it consists of panelists’ insights and recommendations about upcoming sessions. That said, there was a discussion that arose that non-attendees may find of interest. The panel was asked to comment on the recent announcement from Google, Microsoft, and Bing about schema.org. This commentary is available as a separate file below (click “Play the Schema.org discussion”).

On Sunday, June 5, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller at SemTech 2011 in San Francisco, for a special face-to-face presentation of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. Joining them this month was special guest Dave McComb, President of Semantic Arts, and SemTech Conference Co-Chair.
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[Revised and re-posted at 4:03pm EST]

In a collaborative effort reminiscent of sitemaps.org, Google, Yahoo! and Bing have announced the launch of schema.org.  Perhaps the most significant aspect of this announcement is the particular standard they have focused on: namely, microdata.

In the Google announcement, Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta of Google’s search team say, “Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data.”

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Idea Lab recently wrote about the struggle between hNews and rNews. The article states, “We started, back in 2008, with a problem: Very few online news stories had consistent, machine-readable information about their provenance (i.e. basic stuff like who wrote it, who published it, when it was first published, etc.). This was a problem because without this information — or metadata — it was incredibly difficult to differentiate news from other content on the web, or to figure out where news had come from. We searched about for a solution to the problem, thanks to grants from the Knight and MacArthur Foundations, and found not one but two. The first was microformats — which are straightforward, open mark-up formats built on existing standards. The second was RDFa, a method of embedding full RDF, the linked data language of the semantic web.” Read more

A recent article directed at SEO (search engine optimization) professionals gives insight into some emerging terms that are coinciding with the development of Web 3.0. According to the article, “A cornucopia of recent changes all over the web (Google included) are directed at making the internet a more Web 3.0 (semantic) friendly place cluttered with less spam.” Knowledge of the discussed terms should help SEO professionals stay up-to-date with Web 3.0 and out of trouble with Google. Read more

Othar Hansson, Google, Inc.
Kavi Goel, Google, Inc.

In this "Late-Breaking News" session, representatives from Google, Inc. discuss the company’s recent announcements about semantic web technologies and ongoing initiatives.

Attachment: Semantics at Google – RFDa, Microformats, and More.mp3 (38.55 MB)

Presenters:

Othar Hansson
Google, Inc.

Othar Hansson is Technical Lead for the Microformats initiatives at Google.

Kavi Goel
Google, Inc.

Kavi Goel is Rich Snippets Product Manager at Google.