Structured Data Authorship with Schema

Schema JSON-LD standards closing the gap toward RDF paradigm

The Schema vocabulary receives 3 new elements that provide clues about the general direction taken by the most popular initiative on Structured Data.

  • sdPublisher
  • sdDatePublished
  • sdLicense

The Schema standard offers these 3 new elements, its mere existence together with the independent initiative of json-ld.org suggests that the use of Schema is being oriented beyond the markup on HTML and the Rich Snippets, towards a more diversified, multilayer (TCP) and clearly betting on the Linked Data.

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Do not forget that Linked Data correspons to the “LD” at JSON-LD.

Thus, the W3C Semantic Web working groups are bringing Schema JSON-LD closer to the world of RDF and the exchange of data between different platforms, in a distributed environment.

Detailed review of the new Schema elements

  • sdPublisher

    The sdPublisher element allows referencing the Organization or Person under whose initiative, interests and/or responsibility a content has been published (starting from the parent element Thing and arriving at a CreativeWork, as this article could be (BlogPosting).
    In fact, in practice this element allows, for example, to separate the work of creating or editing a web page, the authorship or revision of the structured data it contains, either in embedded mode (RDFa or Microformats/Microdata) or in compact mode (JSON-LD scripts).
    Thanks to sdPublisher we can express 3 different entities not necessarily related, in the same script.

  • sdPublishDate

    This element allows to unlink the creation date of the content represented in the script from the script itself.

    An example: I was asked to create customized JSON-LD scripts; most of the time it’s a great opportunity to use this element.

    Its greatest utility lies in the subtle but unambiguous Schema update signal, more recent than the content itself (content referenced by the script).

    The content referenced by the script may have been created a long time ago, but it turns out that it reaches me as a client’s request on present day. Well, I could specify all the details that Schema allows for the article, including its creation date (a long time ago), but it would make it very clear that the creation date of the JSON-LD script is today.

    Maybe you remember one of the first “popular” algorithms applied to content such as blogs: Content deserves freshness.

    Basically interpreted the actuality of a content by its literal date of creation, among other parameters. Between two valid options, the one that showed a more recent date won. The algorithm is already “old”, but you know, even with changes, something remains…

  • sdLicense

    This element allows inserting the information relative to the license model that the script has.

    For example, you can allow a reuse based on the Creative Commons model. Schema and its syntax types are open standards, but the effort behind a decent script is individual merit. It’s something that can take a lot of time, so finding some script already done or very similar to what you need I think at least it is worthy of credit (typically CC BY).

As far as my professional opinion is concerned, these Schema elements must appear in any script that does not have size restrictions, although this is going very far to the limit… To give us an idea, implement the 3 Schema elements correctly , using the ProfessionalService element to define me as sdPublisher, it costs exactly 814 bytes of code that are added to the total weight of the page to load.

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Coherently for a professional SEO CMS, the new version of Relevant CMS that we will have available at the end of T1 2019 will incorporate these three Schema elements in a configurable way; they will allow us (for example) to differentiate our Schema authorship in the code of our SEO Structured Data service, from whatever the client content is. Remember that the Google Structured Data tandem has its own anti-spam rules!

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