How Do Organizations Publish Semantic Markup? Three Case Studies Using Public Schema.org Crawls

Jointly launched in mid-2011 by major search engines like Google and Bing, Schema.org is designed to facilitate structured and knowledge graph–centric search applications on the Web. The Web Data Commons project has crawled increasing amounts of Schema.org data in recent years, providing a golden opportunity for socio-technological data studies that consider the semantics of content. The authors present empirical studies of organizations in three economic sectors that expose semantically linked Schema.org annotations.

Related Work

As Schema.org has continued to increase in popularity, several researchers have proposed critically analyzing its growth and evolution. A (noncomprehensive) set of Schema.org studies include those on its necessity and design philosophy,⁴ normative analysis,⁵ extraction and identity resolution,⁶ and deployment analysis? among many others. The work of Robert Meusel⁶ is closest to ours in spirit, but because his analysis is purely statistical, he does not actually construct networks from the data or attempt to analyze measures of diversity or dynamicity.