How To Tell Search Engines What “Entities” Are On Your Web Pages by Barbara Starr.
From the post:
Search engines have increasingly been incorporating elements of semantic search to improve some aspect of the search experience — for example, using schema.org markup to create enhanced displays in SERPs (as in Google’s rich snippets).
Elements of semantic search are now present at almost all stages of the search process, and the Semantic Web has played a key role. Read on for more detail and to learn how to take advantage of this opportunity to make your web pages more visible in this evolution of search.
The identifications are fairly coarse, that is you get a pointer (URL) that identifies a subject but no idea why someone picked that URL.
But, we all know how well coarse pointers, document level pointers, have worked for the WWW.
Kinda surprising because we have had sub-document indexing for centuries.
Odd how simply pointing to a text blob suddenly became acceptable.
Think of the efforts by Google and schema.org as an attempt to recover indexing as it existed in the centuries before the advent of the WWW.