Re: Survey of *consuming* apps that make use of Schema.org's medical/health vocabulary

We’ve applied Provider and Medical condition schema over the past few years.

Provider schema does appear in search results as a knowledge graph.




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Andre Perreault
Brand Media

THE RICHARDS GROUP
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From: Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com>
Date: Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 9:24 AM
To: "public-schemed@w3.org" <public-schemed@w3.org>
Cc: Tiffany Jann <tjann@google.com>
Subject: Survey of *consuming* apps that make use of Schema.org's medical/health vocabulary
Resent-From: <public-schemed@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 9:24 AM


Hi folks

I am investigating the deployment status of the schema.org<http://schema.org> medical vocabulary. This is a call to see who is making any use of the vocabulary in significant use-facing applications.

The medical/health vocabulary was added back in 2012, and then cleaned up somewhat by folks here. In all that time I have not become aware of any significant application that consumes (i.e. uses) schema.org<http://schema.org> data based on this vocabulary.

(fwiw, at Google, we have not found the vast majority of the detailed medical terms to be useful for Search.)

To be clear, this does not reflect poorly upon the work that was done here to fix some of the problems with the original design. I think it is rather that Schema.org made a mistake by adding such a massive set of vocabulary terms without motivating use-cases. Much of the vocabulary (see https://health-lifesci.schema.org/) is poorly suited for use in the public Web, both in terms of levels of detail and also because many of the terms look more applicable to private data residing patient record systems where other more widely used data standards already exist.

I suggest we partition the medical/health vocabulary into a smaller set of terms that are aligned with Schema.org's strengths (e.g. simple public information in the Web), and that most of the rest that are not being used should be moved to the "Attic" area of schema.org<http://schema.org>.

Schema.org also periodically encounters problems with the names chosen for the medical types and properties. My colleague, Tiffany Jann (cc:'d) has prepared an initial list of terms (https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2435) that have been used for medical concepts in a way that is problematic for schema.org<http://schema.org>'s wider usability. Again, if there are significant medical/health uses of these terms, please let us know in this thread.

Thanks for any information,

cheers,

Dan