Eric Chau's UBC MLIS Portfolio

06. Content Standard – Analyze

Event at Schema.org

Descriptive Points

  • Published and maintained by Schema.org, “a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet.” It was founded by internet companies such as Google and Microsoft with internet community contributors.
  • It describes any events
    • There are standards for specialized events such as BusinessEvent, ComedyEvent, etc.
  • It is to be used by the internet community to facilitate a standardized way to represent Events on the internet to ensure interoperability
  • Web content publishers are expected to maintain these descriptions, often with aids from Content Management System such as WordPress

Analytical Points

  • It is best for creating a list of events in a standardized format, so that it can be shared and consumed by other platforms (such as content aggregators or social media platforms)
  • It is not a universal registry, and the same event could be entered differently by different people; there is no unique identifier such as the ISBN for books which can help to filter out duplicated Events.
    • There could be discrepancy for the same event created by different data publishers
  • The standard is meant to be a generic, and it might not be suitable or applicable for all events
    • g., Some fields might not be relevant for all events (such as aggregateRating, composer, etc.)
  • Many of the fields are optional and might not be enforced by platforms
    • Validation and enforcement is the responsibility of content publishers or the platform they use
  • It is very likely for me to encounter as a content publisher and system architect.

Reflection

The schema.org event schema, similar to other published schema at schema.org) is designed to provide a guideline for expected interoperability. It has made some great trade-offs re: being generic and flexible enough for most use cases.

It is also interesting to note that major industry players come together to support the standard as interoperability is key for information access and distribution.