Eric Chau's UBC MLIS Portfolio

07. Data Format – 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 is expressed in JSON data format
  • It describes any event
    • 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 describes the schema and data format; such as the location, offers, performance, and description of an event
  • It helps search engines such as Google to index events with rich metadata in predictable format
  • Many Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress have plugins that support the data entry and maintenances of these events in a user-friendly interface; the event JSON will be generated on the fly by the plugin for services such as Google search indexer (spiders) or other tools to consume
  • It is very likely for me to encounter as a content publisher and system architect.
    • It is also critical for search marketers as the meta will help improve search engine results.

Reflection

For this analysis, we focus on the Data Format aspect of the event schema from schema.org. It reuses the same schema used in a previous exercise.

The data format is essentially a JSON output that can be consumed by APIs and web services. Systems planning to support the event schema would consume the JSON input and parse the individual attribute (as specified by the event schema) into their own native, internal format.