Schema.org and One Hundred Years of Search

Schema.org and One Hundred Years of Search Libraries, Media and The Semantic Web BBC Academy, March 28th 2012, London Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>Friday, March 30, 2012

In 20 minutes • Introduce you to the schema.org initiative • Revisit the Web before the Web of 1912 • Use this to describe whats new with schema.org, ... and the practical choices we face when scaling to billions of users and pagesFriday, March 30, 2012

Intro: Dan Brickley • Ex-W3C, helped start Semantic Web project • Worked on RDF/S, FOAF, SKOS & other standards around W3C • Currently danbri@google.com working on <http://schema.org/> project • See also <http://danbri.org/>, @danbriFriday, March 30, 2012

Back to 1912Friday, March 30, 2012

Friday, March 30, 2012

■ The Republic of China is proclaimed. ■ Albert Berry makes the ﬁrst parachute jump from a moving airplane. ■ Prague Party Conference: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party break away from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. ■ France establishes a protectorate over Morocco. ■ RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the northern Atlantic Ocean. ■ Paramount Pictures, the oldest American motion picture studio still in operation, is founded ■ Albania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire. ■ First Balkan War ■ Alan Turing, British mathematician is born ■ Semantic search over structured data goes mainstream, in Belgium. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912Friday, March 30, 2012

Credit and thanks: W. Boyd RaywardFriday, March 30, 2012

Sample queries from 1912Moteur Diesel. Philosophie des mathematiques. Les pecheriesau Maroc et sur la cote dEspagne. Finances Bulgares.Gyroscope. Culte de feu. Motocolture (garden). Evolution dela dent humaine. Emigration italienne. Casier civil. Chemin defer de bagdad (railroad...). Planete Mars. Suffrage universel.Nevrose traumatique. Eugenism. Le saumon; Saumonsmanques et repeches. Boomerang. Fabrication del lacyanamide. Emigration des Juifs. Intoxications par le tabac.Quantite dhuile dolive importee en Belgique. Jurisprudencedes compagnies dassurances en Angleterre, Hollande etDanemark...Friday, March 30, 2012

Search before search • Paul Otlet, "the man who dreamed the Internet", http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmsOI5SdLkE • "The International Centre organises collections of world-wide importance. These collections are the International Museum, the International Library, the International Bibliographic Catalogue and the Universal Documentary Archives. These collections are conceived as parts of one universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientiﬁc objects." • Start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum for full whole storyFriday, March 30, 2012

Libraries, media & ...? • Universal Decimal Classiﬁcation (UDC) used in many 1000s of libraries today • In BBC archive for 40 years, as Lonclass • Shows the challenge and promise of structured description • So whats in Lonclass? Whats not in Lonclass!Friday, March 30, 2012

Lonclass by example • R672:32.007(47)YELTSIN:342.518.1THATCHER “TWO SHOTS OF MARGARET THATCHER AND BORIS YELTSIN” • [BRITISH AEROSPACE].007.11PEARCE: 656.881:342.518.1THATCHER “LETTER TO MRS THATCHER FROM SIR AUSTIN PEARCE” • 656.881:301.162.721:32.007THATCHER: 654.192.731TV-AM “MARGARET THATCHERS LETTER OF APOLOGY TO TV AM”Friday, March 30, 2012

Compositional Semantics • 656.881:301.162.721 “LETTERS OF APOLOGY” • 656.881 “LETTERS (POSTAL SERVICES)” • 656.881:06.022.6 “RESIGNATION LETTERS” • 654.192.731TV-AM “TV AM (TELEVISION AM)” (this work pre-dated modern linguistics, never mind computing...)Friday, March 30, 2012

Archives and classiﬁcation • Lonclass tells a story of the world; of this country at least; and a lot about the rest • It is huge - 1000s of terms, composite sentence-like codes, and rather sparse • It began with UDC in 1890s, and remains key to BBCs media archives even todayFriday, March 30, 2012

And now for something new.Friday, March 30, 2012

Schema.org • Search engine collaboration: • Google, Bing,Yahoo! & Yandex • Simple factual data for better search • Launched June 2011, schema.org schema • 300 classes, 261 properties & growing • discussions: W3C WebSchemas groupFriday, March 30, 2012

Example: Google Rich Snippets From: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets See also Yandexs http://webmaster.yandex.ru/microtest.xmlFriday, March 30, 2012

On IMDB: <div id="content-2-wide" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork"> <div class="txt-block"> <h4 class="inline">Stars:</h4> <a onclick="(new Image()).src=/rg/title-overview/star-1/images/b.gif?link=%2Fname %2Fnm0010930%2F;" href="/name/nm0010930/" itemprop="actors">Douglas Adams</a>, <a onclick="(new Image()).src=/rg/title-overview/star-2/images/b.gif?link=%2Fname %2Fnm0048982%2F;" href="/name/nm0048982/" itemprop="actors">Tom Baker</a> and <a onclick="(new Image()).src=/rg/title-overview/star-3/images/b.gif?link=%2Fname %2Fnm3035100%2F;" href="/name/nm3035100/" itemprop="actors">Hans Peter Brondmo</ a> </div> <div class="star-box" itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating"> Linked Data: see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0010930/ for schema.org markup describing Douglas Adams as a http://schema.org/Person (jobTitle, birthDate, description, performerIn, ...).Friday, March 30, 2012

What’s in the schema? • Classes (types) e.g. LocalBusiness, Person, Organization,VideoObject, TVSeries... • Properties (attributes) e.g. openingHours, transcript, productionCompany, streetAddress • That’s all - a dictionary of terms, used for annotating data within normal Web pagesFriday, March 30, 2012

CreativeWork event UserInteraction LocalBusiness intangible place Organization CivicStructure LandformFriday, March 30, 2012

Another example:Friday, March 30, 2012

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Restaurant"> <span itemprop="name">GreatFood</span> <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"> <span itemprop="streetAddress">1901 Lemur Ave</span> <span itemprop="addressLocality">Sunnyvale</span>, <span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">94086</span> </div> <span itemprop="telephone">(408) 714-1489</span> <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.dishdash.com">www.greatfood.com</a> Hours: <meta itemprop="openingHours" content="Mo-Sa 11:00-14:30">Mon-Sat 11am-2:30pm <meta itemprop="openingHours" content="Mo-Th 17:00-21:30">Mon-Thu 5pm-9:30pm <meta itemprop="openingHours" content="Fr-Sa 17:00-22:00">Fri-Sat 5pm-10:00pm Categories: <span itemprop="servesCuisine">Middle Eastern</span>, <span itemprop="servesCuisine">Mediterranean</span></div>Friday, March 30, 2012

Schema.org scope • In-page structured data for search • Not asking an unconstrained “so, how do we describe cars?”, but “how can we improve markup on existing pages that describe cars?” (or Comics, SoftwareApps, Sports, ...) • Simplify publisher/webmaster experience • Record agreements between search engines • Central use case: augmented search resultsFriday, March 30, 2012

Schema.org and UDC • In many ways the opposite of UDC • Small (by contrast), pragmatic, Web-based • Yet by Semantic Web standards and culture, it is a big centralised schema • The art is ﬁnding ways to decentralise without creating chaos • We dont want to re-invent UDC, or Wikipedia; but integrate such things into simple descriptive templates for searchFriday, March 30, 2012

Lots missing! e.g. sports • Current vocabulary emphasizes points of interest on a map and sporting activities rather than sports content as entertainment • We also have terms to describe videos, TV shows etc., ...but no sports-speciﬁcs yet • How deep to go? How to integrate with existing vocabulary? How to identify players, teams, kinds of football? Video clips for that hand of God goal?Friday, March 30, 2012

http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals Job postings (done), rNews(done), Comics, Learning, ScholaryArticle, Software, Events, Genealogy, Real Estate, eCommerce, Health, Sports, Transport,Vehicles, Comments, Datasets, Bio, ... (+bugﬁxes, integration, ...)Friday, March 30, 2012

Everything overlaps * • We added JobPosting; what if the job was sports-related? • Were adding educational markup; does it help describe sports education, training? • Is there a sports perspective on the health/ medical vocabulary were working on? • Cant coordinate everything! Pragmatism... * intertwingularityFriday, March 30, 2012

Practicalities • Delegation to external sources for enumerations and detail • e.g. country codes from UN FAO or Wikipedia/DBpedia/Wikidata • We don’t want to create big enumerations • all the countries? sports? things that go on maps? • Decentralised subclassing & property valuesFriday, March 30, 2012

Process • Search partners retain ultimate oversight • W3C hosts community group, discussion, wiki and proposal tracking • Web Schemas group - planning monthly telecons at W3C, based around proposals • Evolving, pragmatic, collaborativeFriday, March 30, 2012

Compositional Semantics revisited • If we have SportsCentre and Karate, we can we describe a Karate Club? • If we have recipes vocab, and medical vocab, and restaurants, can we describe allergy free food? • If UN have country codes, Wikipedia list religions, ... then we just re-use thoseFriday, March 30, 2012

And libraries • If the library world share their controlled vocabularies as open SKOS linked data • ...can we plug them directly into schema.org descriptions? • of videos? news? scholarly articles? (yes) • Why re-invent when you can collaborate?Friday, March 30, 2012

WebSchemas public-vocabs list • Schema.org process • Looking for rough consensus and incremental improvements • Realistic examples, simplicity for publishers, and re-use of existing vocabulary are important • <http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/>Friday, March 30, 2012