Schema.org is an initiative launched on 2 June 2011 by Bing
Bing
Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft.Bing may also refer to:* An onomatopœia of a bell sound* Bing cherry, a variety of cherry* Bing , Chinese flatbread* Bing , a German company that manufactured toys and kitchen utensils...
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
Yandex is a Russian IT company which operates the largest search engine in Russia and develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex is ranked as 5-th world largest search engine...
(largest search engine in Russia) joined the initiative . The operators of the world's largest search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
about itself, using microdata, according to their schema
Schema
The word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" , which means shape, or more generally, plan. The plural is "σχήματα"...
s. Those schemas can be recognized by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus gaining access to the meaning of the sites. The initiative started with a small number of formats, but the long term goal is to support a wider range of schemas. The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties. A mailing list is provided, for discussion of the initiative.
Much of the vocabulary on schema.org was inspired by earlier formats such as Microformat
Microformat
A microformat is a web-based approach to semantic markup which seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support HTML, such as RSS...
s, FOAF, GoodRelations and OpenCyc.
A canonical mapping from the terms defined in Schema.org to RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
RDF Schema is a set of classes with certain properties using the RDF extensible knowledge representation language, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies, otherwise called RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF resources...
) is available.
Example
The following is an example of how to embed information about a movie and the structure of the information into a website. 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. Within the schema for a movie is a schema for a person.
