WordCamp GR 2017 – Computers <3 Structured Data – Steve Grunwell

https://github.com/stevegrunwell/structured-data/blob/master/README.md

https://stevegrunwell.github.io/structured-data/

What is Structured Data?

• Standards to help computers to understand our content.
• Content is for humans. Structured data is for machines.

Structured Data

• Structured data is all about providing context
• itemtype/itemprop/content

HTML/XML

• HyperText and eXtensible Markup Language
• Meant to convey information in a meaningful way
• Generic layout

RSS

• An extension of XML for content sydication
• Introduced structure: post titles, content, dates
• Standardized and can be validated

Microformats & Dublin Core

• Competing standards for rich data
  • Dublin Core is a specific set of standards, but designed to be limited in scope
    • Uses meta tags
  • Microformats – uses class names

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

• A specification for modeling metadata
• New attributes

Opengraph

• Facebook’s social graph
• Used to create rich media when sharing content on the platform
• Uses metatags

Schema.org

• Structured data standard with broad vocabulary
• Supported by Google, Microsoft, etc

A Thing For All Occasions

• Thing
  • CreativeWork
    • Article
      • SocialMediaPosting
        • BlogPosting

Properties

• Thing: Name/description
  • CreativeWork: Date created/license/publisher
    • Article: Article body/word count

Schema as JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data)

Why is Structured Data Important?

• Helps machines handle data better
• SEO
• Semantics and accessibility
• Disambiguation

Google’s Knowledge Graph

• Enhanced results from structured data
• search engine => answer engine
• Google Home/Assistant

Leveraging Structured Data

• Google’s Testing Tool
• Schemify – WordPress Plugin

“Never forget, the content you write is for humans, not machines.”

Resources:

• Google – Structured Data Testing Tool