Schema.org

Schema.org maintains a shared vocabulary that webmasters can use to structure metadata on their websites to help search engines understand the published content. It is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, web pages, email messages, and more.

Schema.org vocabulary can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD. These vocabularies cover entities, relationships between entities, and actions and can easily be extended through a well-documented extension model. Over 10 million sites use Schema.org to mark up their web pages and email messages. Many applications from Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex, and others already use these vocabularies to power rich, extensible experiences.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex are founding companies of the group. Additionally, there is substantial participation by the larger web community, through public mailing lists such as public-vocabs@w3.org and through GitHub, where schema.org issues are tracked.

Schemas are sets of "types," each associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy. The organization's vocabulary currently consists of 797 types, 1453 properties, 14 datatypes, 86 enumerations, and 462 enumeration members. Examples of types include CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries, LocalBusiness, Restaurant and Offer.

Example of Schema.org for Movie Type

Schema.org is organized into two groups: a steering group responsible for high-level oversight of the project and a larger community group that handles the day-to-day activity of schema evolution, discussion, and integration. Schema.org's community group prepares releases for the approval of the steering group.

Dan Brickley runs the daily operations for Schema.org. He is Google's representative on the steering group. Other members of the steering group include representatives from the other founding companies, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Yandex, a representative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and a small number of individuals who have contributed substantially to Schema.org. Discussions of the steering group are public.

In April 2015, the W3C Schema.org Community Group became the main forum for schema collaboration and provided the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list for discussions.

Schema.org was founded and announced in June 2011 by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. In November 2011, Yandex joined the group as well. The organization was formed to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages as a resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their web pages to help search engines better understand their websites. Even though these companies compete, they banded together because collaboration in this space would be good for each search engine individually and for the industry as a whole.