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The latest release of Schema.org (3.4) includes some significant enhancements for those interested in marking up tourism, and trips in general.
For tourism markup two new types TouristDestination and TouristTrip have joined the already useful TouristAttraction
These TouristAttraction enhancements have significantly improved the capability for describing Tourist Attractions and hopefully enabling more tourist discoveries
There have been discussions in Schema.org about the way Organizations their offices, branches and other locations can be marked up; they exposed a lack of clarity in the way to structure descriptions of Organizations and their locations, offices, branches , etc.
To address that lack of clarity I thought it would be useful to share some examples here.
I spend a significant amount of time working 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 release of Schema.org 3.1 and share some hidden gems you find in there.
Two, on the surface, totally unconnected posts – yet the the same message. Well that’s how they seem to me anyway.
Post 1 – The Problem With Wikidata from Mark Graham writing in the Atlantic. Post 2 – Danbri has moved on – should we follow? by a former colleague Phil Archer.
An ambition for the web is to reflect and assist what we humans do in the real world. Search has only brought us part of the way. By identifying key words in web page text, and links between those pages, it makes a reasonable stab at identifying things that might be related to the keywords we enter.
As I commented recently, Semantic Search messages coming from Google indicate that they are taking significant steps towards the ambition. By harvesting Schema.org described metadata embedded in html
Today’s Wall Street Journal gives us an insight in to the makeover underway in the Google search department. Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. They are going about this by developing the search engine [that] will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. The ‘amassing’ got a kick start …
Most Semantic Web and Linked Data enthusiasts will tell you that Linked Data is not rocket science, and it is not. They will tell you that RDF is one of the simplest data forms for describing things, and they are right. They will tell you that adopting Linked Data makes merging disparate datasets much easier to do, and it does. They will say that publishing persistent globally addressable URIs (identifiers) for your things and concepts will make it easier for others to reference and share them, it will. They will tell you that it will enable you to add value …
I believe Data, or more precisely changes in how we create, consume, and interact with data, has the potential to deliver a seventh wave impact. With the advent of many data associated advances, variously labelled Big Data, Social Networking, Open Data, Cloud Services, Linked Data, Microformats, Microdata, Semantic Web, Enterprise Data, it is now venturing beyond those closed systems into the wider world. It is precisely because these trends have been around for a while, and are starting to mature and influence each other, that they are building to form something really significant.
The BBC team have been evolving their approach to delivering agile, effective, websites in an efficient way by building on Linked Data foundations, sector by sector – wildlife, news, music, World Cup 2010, and now in readiness for London 2012 – the whole sport experience. Since the launch a few days ago, the main comment seems to be that it is ‘very yellow’, which it is. Not much reference to the innovative approach under the hood – as it should be. If you can see the technology, you have got it wrong.
