Schema.org has announced that GoodRelations is now fully integrated into the markup vocabulary backed by Google, Yahoo!, Bing/Microsoft, and Yandex (read our past schema.org coverage). GoodRelations is the e-commerce vocabulary that has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 (previous coverage).

In the official announcement, R.V. Guha (Google) says, “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.”

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Panelists: Ivan Herman (Moderator), Dan Brickley, R.V. Guha, Peter Mika, Steve Macbeth, Jeffrey Preston, Alexandre Shubin, Evan Sandhaus

A packed room at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco played host to the much-anticipated Schema.org panel on Wednesday morning. As W3C semantic activity lead and moderator Ivan Herman had hoped (see this article), the discussion didn’t get bogged down in a duel between RDFa and microdata, but rather emphasized some important accomplishments of the last year and looked forward to future work.

As Herman put it, the only discussion he wanted to have around RDFa was to announce that the proposed RDFa 1.1 recommendations are expected to be published as official W3C standards Thursday, and that there had been a lot of interaction with the schema.org folks to make this useable for them as well.

Wednesday’s panel was composed of: Dan Brickley, of Schema.org at Google;  R.V. Guha of Google;  Steve Macbeth of Microsoft; Peter Mika ofYahoo!; Jeffrey W. Preston of Disney Interactive Media Group; Evan Sandhaus of The New York Times Company; and Alexander Shubin of Yandex.

Here are highlights of what took place:

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Last month, we reported on the new RDFa 1.1 Lite proposal by Ben Adida. In our recent podcast on Schema.org with guest Ramanathan V. Guha, we touched on the topic of RDFa Lite as well.

Today, schema.org spokesperson Dan Brickley posted that “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.”

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On Friday, October 14, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about schema.org. The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, Ramanathan V. Guha, Google Fellow, and one of the principal people behind schema.org.

• Play the Podcast (1 hour)
• Subscribe to the Monthly Podcast
• See All Semantic Link Podcasts

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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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