Schema.org Community Group: thanks to everyone who contributed in 2015, and looking forward to 2016

Schema.org has had a busy year. We made 4 major releases
<http://schema.org/docs/releases.html> (1.93, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) including some
major vocabulary cleanup for 2.0. We introduced a new approach to extensions
<http://schema.org/docs/extension.html>, established a new steering group
<http://schema.org/docs/about.html> with public discussions and broader
participation, and adopted W3C's Community Group platform as a home not
only for the core schema.org group, but for related topical discussions and
schema developments in nearby groups. Some of these (bibextend
<https://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/>, automotive
<https://www.w3.org/community/gao/>) have already begun publishing as
hosted schema.org extensions (see bib.schema.org, auto.schema.org). Several
more are in the pipeline, including medical/health
<https://www.w3.org/community/schemed/>, courses
<https://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/>, finance
<https://www.w3.org/community/fibo/2015/12/04/invitation-to-participation-in-the-fibo-w3c-community-group/>,
sports <https://www.w3.org/community/sport-schema/>, tourism
<https://www.w3.org/community/tourismdata/>, archival
<https://www.w3.org/community/architypes/>, ... and many other proposals
for schema improvements and additions are under development within the core
schema.org community's GitHub repository.

As 2015 draws to a close I want to take a moment from all these
developments to thank *everyone* in this community who has contributed to
the project's growth and success. We have had countless and invaluable
bugfixes and small tweaks to definitions and examples, alongside many
substantial improvements in schema.org's expressivity. Just in the last
year schema.org acquired terminology for describing (amongst other things)
visual artworks, invoices, screening events, movie and video game clips,
social media postings, barcodes, data feeds, legal services, geographic
service areas, catalogues of offers, exhibition events, and much more. In
addition to new properties for these and other categories of thing, we have
continued to focus on fine-grained integration and consistency. This has
become an increasingly important activity as our vocabularies have grown,
and will be an essential activity through 2016 as we work to integrate
extension ideas from a growing network of collaborating communities.

Proposals around better recipe descriptions, on hotels/tourism and
accomodation, on educational courses and events/opening hours are all
maturing fast and will keep us busy as 2016 begins. There are also projects
and proposals bubbling under around describing political entities including
fact checking, and legal documentation, which we'll be hearing more from
soon, as well as GS1's work on an external extension covering food
packaging and related topics.

Having listed all these vocabulary areas I'd like to close with one
observation that we haven't made clearly enough over the years: that there
are many other important ways of collaborating on structured data schemas
that go beyond the creation of vocabulary definitions. In particular:
examples. Throughout 2016 I hope we can put renewed effort into creating,
improving and expanding the examples in our documentation, in
acknowledgement that for many publishers, concrete examples are the primary
route to learning and using schema.org. Examples are also the primary
mechanism for showing how to combine different aspects of schema.org in a
real world situation, as well as the way we demonstrate how schema.org can
work across different syntaxes (microdata, rdfa, json-ld, ...). As we now
have at least 8 other schema.org-related W3C community groups it is
important to consider other kinds of activity beyond vocabulary creation:
examples, deeper documentation and case studies, tooling, community events
and meetups, ...

Thanks once more to all those who have been part of the project this year,
and welcome to those who have joined the W3C Schema.org Community Group
more recently. According to the W3C listing
<https://www.w3.org/community/groups/> we are now the 7th largest Community
Group! And as a reminder, if you find our mailing list
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-schemaorg/> is too quiet for
you, don't forget to join in over at Github
<http://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg> where the vast majority of detailed
work happens.

All the best for  2016,

cheers,

Dan

(expecting to get a mountain of vacation message bounces :)

--
schema.org community group chair