Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow

In 2011, we announced schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. Since that time, schema.org has been a resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages so that search engines can use that data to index content better and surface it in new experiences like rich snippets, GMail, and the Google App.

Schema.org, which provides a growing vocabulary for describing various kinds of entity in terms of properties and relationships, has become increasingly important as the Web transitions to a multi-device, mobile-oriented world. We are now seeing schema.org being used on many millions of Web sites, defining data types and properties common across applications, platforms and products, in order to enhance the user experience by delivering the most relevant information they need, when they need it.

Schema.org in Google Rich Snippets

Schema.org in Google Knowledge Graph panels

Schema.org in Recipe carousels

In Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web, an overview article published this week on ACM, we report some key schema.org adoption metrics from a sample of 10 billion pages from a combination of the Google index and Web Data Commons. In this sample, 31.3% of pages have schema.org markup, up from 22% one year ago. Structured data markup is now a core part of the modern web.

The schema.org group at W3C is now amongst the largest active W3C communities, serving as a hub for diverse groups exploring schemas covering diverse topics such as sports, healthcare, e-commerce, food packaging, bibliography and digital archive management. Other companies, also make use of the same data to build different applications, and as new use cases arise further schemas are integrated via community discussion at W3C. Each of these topics in turn have subtle inter-relationships - for example schemas for food packaging, for flight reservations, for recipes and for restaurant menus, each have different approaches to describing food restrictions and allergies. Rather than try to force a common unified approach across these domains, schema.orgs evolution is pragmatic, driven by the combination of available Web data, and the likelihood of mainstream consuming applications.

Schema.org is also finding new kinds of uses. One exciting line of work is the use of schema.org marked up pages as training corpus for machine learning. John Foley, Michael Bendersky and Vanja Josifovski used schema.org data to build a system that can learn to recognize events that may be geographically local to a particular user. Other researchers are looking at using schema.org pages with similar markup, but in different languages, to automatically create parallel corpora for machine translation.

Four years after its launch, Schema.org is entering its next phase, with more of the vocabulary development taking place in a more distributed fashion, as extensions. As schema.org adoption has grown, a number groups with more specialized vocabularies have expressed interest in extending schema.org with their terms. Examples of this include real estate, product, finance, medical and bibliographic information. A number of extensions, for topics ranging from automobiles to product details, are already underway. In such a model, schema.org itself is just the core, providing a unifying vocabulary and congregation forum as necessary.

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Back in January I blogged about the recurring Internet meme of achieving and maintaining Inbox Zero. I thought a couple of months later it would be useful to update you on my progress and what effect its had on my productivity. Using the technique described in my blog post I archived all of the mail in my inbox older than a couple of months. I was an early adopter of Gmail and had tens of thousands of emails in my inbox; hey, you never ever had to delete them, right! I then laboriously went through the remaining emails, deleting or archiving those I could, and actioning the ones I couldnt until my inbox was empty - yes, this did take a few hours.
   

   Using an app on my iPhone and iPad, called Mailbox, Ive found it easy and enjoyable to stay at Inbox Zero. First lets look at why Mailbox helps me maintain an empty inbox. With just a simple swipe and a click and can easily defer an email if I dont want to reply to it straight away. The defer actions (seen on the right) are reasonably self explanatory. What Mailbox does is moves emails from your inbox into folders that depending on your choice ensures that the mail will reappear in your inbox at the designated time and date.
   Ill use one of those irritating work emails that arrive in your inbox at 5:30pm on Friday afternoon to show what happens. The mail in question perhaps requires some thought or information obtained from work systems. I wont be able to physically deal with it until Monday anyway. So I defer the mail to "Next Week". Mailbox then  removes that email from my inbox and it will appear first thing Monday morning for me to action. Mail can also be easily deleted, archived and directed to specific folders (labels in Gmail) with simple gestures.
   Why then is this so helpful? Consider that friday afternoon work mail. Previously it would have been sitting in my inbox all weekend, nagging at me. Constantly reminding me it needed dealing to all weekend. Now I can totally forget about, relaxed in the certainty it will reappear next week when I can actually do something about it. This form of positive deferment is really very liberating. I action mail when I need to and defer those that I can to an appropriate time in the future: a few hours later, tomorrow, next week, in a month, a specific date, or someday (a deferment for mails that might be fun or interesting to deal with but have no priority). Maintaining inbox zero has, I think, made me more relaxed and productive.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

via Personal Recipe 895909

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