In the previous few segments , you saw that we need a stru cture useing which we can represent the meaning of sentences. One such schematic structure[used widely by search engines to index web pages] is schema.org.
Schema. org is a joint effort by Google ,Yahoo, Bing and Yasndex[Russian search engine] to creat a large schema relating the most commonly occuring entities on web pages. The main purpose of the schema is to ease search engine querying and improve search performance.
For example, say a web page of a hotel (e.g. Hotel Ginger) contains the words ‘Ginger’ and ‘four stars’. How would a search engine indexing this page know whether the word ‘Ginger’ refers to the plant ginger or Hotel Ginger? Similarly, how would it know whether the phrase ‘four stars’ refers to the rating of a hotel or to astronomical stars?
To solve this problem ,schema . org provides a way to explicity specify the types of entities on web pages. For example,one can explicity mention that `Ginger is the name of the hotel and specify various entities such as its rating price etc. (example HTML shown below).
Even if you not femiliar with HTML,just notice the attributes itemtype=Hotel and itemprop=name, rating and price.These atributes explicity mention that the text on the web page(in the section inside the <div>) is about a hotel, that the hotel’s name is Ginger, its rating is four stars and the price is INR 3500.
Huge schmas or` knowledge graphs`of the world ,such as schema org,are quite important while building semantic processing engines (such as web search engines).Although you will not be working on such schemas/web-based search in this course, it is an important resource to know about.
You can read more about schema.org here:
- An example showing how a web page can use schema.org to specify entity types
- How bank and finanical institutions can use schemas for making up banks and thier products
- Schema. orgFAQS:The basics ofthe schema.org (who, what, why etc.) answered concisely