 | |
| Abbreviation | schema |
|---|---|
| Year started | 2011; 14 years ago (2011) |
| Latest version | 28.0 (2024-09-17)[1] |
| Organization | Google,Yahoo!,Microsoft,Yandex |
| Base standards | URI,HTML5,RDF,Microdata,ISO 8601 |
| Related standards | RDFa,Microformat,RDFS,OWL,N-Triples,Turtle,JSON,JSON-LD,CSV |
| Domain | Semantic Web |
| License | CC-BY-SA 3.0 |
| Website | schema |
Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for usingstructured data mark-up on web-pages (in the form ofmicrodata,RDFa orJSON-LD). Its main objective is to standardizeHTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (displayed as visual data or infographic tables on search engine results) about a certain topic of interest.[2] It is a part of thesemantic web project, which aims to make document mark-up codes more readable and meaningful to both humans and machines.
Schema.org is an initiative launched on June 2, 2011, byBing,Google andYahoo![3][4][5] (operators of the world's largestsearch engines at that time)[6] to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. In November 2011,Yandex (whose search engine is the largest inRussia) joined the initiative.[7][8] They propose using the schema.org vocabulary along with theMicrodata,RDFa, orJSON-LD formats[9] to mark up website content withmetadata about itself. Such markup can be recognized bysearch engine spiders and otherparsers, thus granting access to the meaning of the sites (seeSemantic Web). The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties.[10] In 2012, theGoodRelationsontology was integrated into Schema.org.[11]Public discussion of the initiative largely takes place on theW3C public vocabulariesmailing list.[12]
Much of the vocabulary on Schema.org was inspired by earlier formats, such asmicroformats,FOAF, andOpenCyc.[13] Microformats, with its most dominant representativehCard, continue (as of 2015) to be published widely on the web, where the deployment of Schema.org has strongly increased between 2012 and 2014.[14] In 2015,[15] Google began supporting theJSON-LD format, and as of September, 2017 recommended using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible.[16][17]
Despite the advantages of using Schema.org, adoption remained limited as of 2016. A survey in 2016 of 300 US-based marketing agencies and B2C advertisers acrossindustries showing only 17% uptake.[18] As of 2024 over 45 million web domains have used schema markup on their web pages.[19]
Validators, such as the deprecated[20] Google Structured Data Testing Tool, or more recent[21] Google Rich Results Test Tool,[22] Schema.org Markup Validator,[23] Yandex Microformat validator,[24] and Bing Markup Validator[25] can be used to test thevalidity of the data marked up with the schemas and Microdata. More recently,Google Search Console (formerly webmaster tools) has provided a report section for unparsable structured data. If any Schema code on a website is incorrect, it will show in this report.[26] Some schema markups such as Organization and Person are commonly used to influence search results returned byGoogle's Knowledge Graph.[27]
Schema vocabulary includes sets oftypes, which each have related metadata properties that can be illustrated using pre definedenumerations and Datatypes. Types are managed by schema.org and are regularly updated as of February 2025, there are over 800 schema types.[28] There are a number of subjects and elements that a web pages that can be marked up with using a Schema, with examples including:
The following is an example[29] of how to mark up information about a movie and its director using the Schema.org schemas and microdata. In order to mark up the data, the attributeitemtype along with theURL of the schema is used. The attributeitemscope defines the scope of the itemtype. The kind of the current item can be defined by using the attributeitemprop.
<divitemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"><h1itemprop="name">Avatar</h1><divitemprop="director"itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> Director:<spanitemprop="name">James Cameron</span> (born<timeitemprop="birthDate"datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)</div><spanitemprop="genre">Science fiction</span><ahref="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a></div>
<divvocab="http://schema.org/"typeof="Movie"><h1property="name">Avatar</h1><divproperty="director"typeof="Person"> Director:<spanproperty="name">James Cameron</span>(born<timeproperty="birthDate"datetime="1954-08-16">August 16, 1954</time>)</div><spanproperty="genre">Science fiction</span><ahref="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"property="trailer">Trailer</a></div>
<scripttype="application/ld+json">{"@context":"http://schema.org/","@type":"Movie","name":"Avatar","director":{"@type":"Person","name":"James Cameron","birthDate":"1954-08-16"},"genre":"Science fiction","trailer":"../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"}</script>
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