Code4lib Day 1 Morning: HTML5, Microdata and Schema.org (and other takeaways)

I did not take notes on everything in part because some of it was very technical and it can be hard to do notes, but here are some takeaways from the morning:

• Versioning Control: Use it, Git or Mercurial. Doesn’t need to be code, can be data too. – Description and Slides
• Take library data and make it available to users, can’t expect them to search for it.
• Linked Data doesn’t need to be a huge project. Start small.
• Why RDF? It’s flexible with easy addition of new attributes or classes, and works cleanly with an iterative approach.

HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org

by Jason Ronallo

Other than getting good ranking, we need to provide rich results, i.e. rich snippets. Some digital collection have been providing rich snippets already, such as NCSU Libraries.

How do we get this?

• embedded semantic markup
• HTML5 Semantics include nav, header, article, section, footer
• HTML5 Microdata is a syntax for annotating content to communicate meaning of data to machines
• similar to RDFA, other microdata
• Microdata comes back as tree based JSON and allows for DOM API

For example:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization&#8221; itemref=”logo”>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”http://code4lib.org/”&gt;
<span itemprop=”name”>Code4Lib<\span>
</a>
</div>
where: scope = about something
type = type of item
prop = properties

For the user, there is no difference as display is the same. This provides a complete data model.

Schema.org  is a one-stop shop for vocabulary in describing items on the web.

Apologies, I did not take extensive notes on it, but to read more, check out the slides below or the Code4lib article he wrote.

Author: Cynthia

Technologist, Librarian, Metadata and Technical Services expert, Educator, Mentor, Web Developer, UXer, Accessibility Advocate, Documentarian View all posts by Cynthia