Hidden Gems in the new Schema.org 3.1 Release

I spend a significant amount of time working with Google folks, especially Dan Brickley, and others on the supporting software, vocabulary contents, and application of Schema.org.  So it is with great pleasure, and a certain amount of relief, I share the announcement of the release of 3.1.

That announcement lists several improvements, enhancements and additions to the vocabulary that appeared in versions 3.0 & 3.1. These include:

• Health Terms – A significant reorganisation of the extensive collection of medical/health terms, that were introduced back in 2012, into the ‘health-lifesci’ extension, which now contains 99 Types, 179 Properties and 149 Enumeration values.
• Finance Terms – Following an initiative and work by Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) project (which I have the pleasure to be part of), in support of the W3C Financial Industry Business Ontology Community Group, several terms to improve the capability for describing things such as banks, bank accounts, financial products such as loans, and monetary amounts.
• Spatial and Temporal and Datasets – CreativeWork now includes spatialCoverage and temporalCoverage which I know my cultural heritage colleagues and clients will find very useful.  Like many enhancements in the Schema.org community, this work came out of a parallel interest, in which  Dataset has received some attention.
• Hotels and Accommodation – Substantial new vocabulary for describing hotels and accommodation has been added, and documented.
• Pending Extension – Introduced in version 3.0 a special extension called “pending“, which provides a place for newly proposed schema.org terms to be documented, tested and revised.  The anticipation being that this area will be updated with proposals relatively frequently, in between formal Schema.org releases.
• How We Work – A HowWeWork document has been added to the site. This comprehensive document details the many aspects of the operation of the community, the site, the vocabulary etc. – a useful way in for casual users through to those who want immerse themselves in the vocabulary its use and development.

For fuller details on what is in 3.1 and other releases, checkout the Releases document.

Hidden Gems

Often working in the depths of the vocabulary, and the site that supports it, I get up close to improvements that on the surface are not obvious which some [of those that immerse themselves] may find interesting that I would like to share:

• Snappy Performance – The Schema.org site, a Python app hosted on the Google App Engine, is shall we say a very popular site.  Over the last 3-4 releases I have been working on taking full advantage of muti-threaded, multi-instance, memcache, and shared datastore capabilities. Add in page caching imrovements plus an implementation of Etags, and we can see improved site performance which can be best described as snappiness. The only downsides being, to see a new version update you sometimes have to hard reload your browser page, and I have learnt far more about these technologies than I ever thought I would need!
• Data Downloads – We are often asked for a copy of the latest version of the vocabulary so that people can examine it, develop form it, build tools on it, or whatever takes their fancy.  This has been partially possible in the past, but now we have introduced (on a developers page we hope to expand with other useful stuff in the future – suggestions welcome) a download area for vocabulary definition files.  From here you can download, in your favourite format (Triples, Quads, JSON-LD, Turtle), files containing the core vocabulary, individual extensions, or the whole vocabulary.  (Tip: The page displays the link to the file that will always return the latest version.)
• Data Model Documentation – Version 3.1 introduced updated contents to the Data Model documentation page, especially in the area of conformance.  I know from working with colleagues and clients, that it is sometimes difficult to get your head around Schema.org’s use of Multi-Typed Entities (MTEs) and the ability to use a Text, or a URL, or Role for any property value.  It is good to now have somewhere to point people when they question such things.
• Markdown – This is a great addition for those enhancing, developing and proposing updates to the vocabulary.  The rdfs:comment section of term definitions are now passed through a Markdown processor.  This means that any formatting or links to be embedded in term description do not have to be escaped with horrible coding such as & and > etc.  So for example a link can be input as [The Link](http://example.com/mypage) and italic text would be input as *italic*.  The processor also supports WikiLinks style links, which enables the direct linking to a page within the site so [[CreativeWork]] will result in the user being taken directly to the CreativeWork page via a correctly formatted link.   This makes the correct formatting of type descriptions a much nicer experience, as it does my debugging of the definition files.

I could go on, but won’t  – If you are new to Schema.org, or very familiar, I suggest you take a look.