The Correct End Of Your Telescope – Viewing Schema.org Adoption by Richard Wallis.
I have been banging on about Schema.org for a while. For those that have been lurking under a structured data rock for the last year, it is an initiative of cooperation between Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex to establish a vocabulary for embedding structured data in web pages to describe ‘things’ on the web. Apart from the simple significance of having those four names in the same sentence as the word cooperation, this initiative is starting to have some impact. As I reported back in June, the search engines are already seeing some 7%-10% of pages they crawl containing Schema.org markup. Like it or not, it is clear that Schema.org is rapidly becoming a de facto way of marking up your data if you want it to be shared on the web and have it recognised by the major search engines.
It is no coincidence then, at OCLC we chose Schema.org as the way to expose linked data in WorldCat. If you haven’t seen it, just search for any item at worldcat.org, scroll to the bottom of the page and open up the Linked Data tab and there you will see the [not very pretty, but hay it’s really designed for systems not humans] Schema.org marked up linked data for the item, with links out to other data sources such as VIAF, LCSH, FAST, and Dewey.
Schema.org has much to recommend itself but I suspect that HTML remains the “…de facto way of marking up your data if you want it to be shared on the web and have it recognised by the major search engines.”
Ten percent is no mean feat but it is still ten percent.