Re: How are you currently generating Schema.org syntax?

On Thu, 12 Jul 2018 at 16:47, Joe Duarte <songofapollo@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This is a question I've had for a long time. I'm not aware of any software
> that can automatically generate Schema.org syntax for content like an
> article, event, product, etc. I'm speaking of body content, not the head.
>
> For example, if I write an article that mentions some moderately famous
> scientist, I want to insert the sameAs syntax with a link to his or her
> Wikipedia page or ORCID page to let search engines know that I'm talking
> about this particular person. Hopefully that would strengthen the article's
> SEO or whatever and lead to more readers.
>
> I have to do that and any other kind of Schema.org markup manually. I'd
> really like to go wheels up with it and markup just about everything in an
> article, any mention of a city, country, scientific paper, person, car, all
> of it. But it would be a lot of work as I understand the situation
> currently.
>
> So how are you doing it? Are there any major publishers that thoroughly
> mark up their articles? Have they released any open source tools? (Sorry if
> I missed a thread.)
>
> It seems like automated, thorough markup would require very powerful
> software, like IBM Watson or other machine learning tools. Am I correct in
> assuming that you're all doing it manually? The WP plugins I saw seemed to
> only do the head page-level metadata, not the thorough embedded markup.
>
> Schema.org has been developed to satisfy various criteria or goals. It
> occurs to me that one design goal could be* ease of automation*. I'm not
> sure what that would look like – I'll have to think about it some more.
>

The initial central usecase for Schema.org, and still pretty core, was the
idea that sites very often *already* have highly structured data in
databases of various kinds. And sites already have mechanisms (templates
etc.) that turn database records into user-facing HTML. Schema.org simply
allowed more of that original structure to be exposed. In practice, there
are often sites that want to expose Schema.org descriptions but don't quite
have the right fields. For example around fact checking and our ClaimReview
markup, many fact checking organizations already have more or less what's
needed but too often in an understructured form. So you'll sometimes see
initiatives (often case specific, e.g. http://sharethefacts.org/) that try
to make things easier for publishers in that situation.

Dan


> Cheers,
>
> JD
>