Schema.org

Semantic & Data Protocol

A shared vocabulary of types and properties for marking up structured data on web pages, maintained by a founding consortium of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex under W3C Community Group process. Roughly 800 types and 1,500 properties cover creative works, events, organizations, people, places, products and actions. Schema.org markup is consumed by search engines and other aggregators to interpret page content, making it the most widely deployed structured-data vocabulary on the web by a very large margin. Included here as the incumbent general-purpose vocabulary that decentralized alternatives interoperate with or define themselves against.

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License Open — vocabulary definitions and site source published at https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg; terms released under CC BY-SA 3.0, software components under Apache-2.0
Dev Status 🟢 Active
Owner Schema.org — founded and steered by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex; developed through the W3C Schema.org Community Group with a public issue tracker. Steering Group includes the founding sponsors plus W3C and community representatives
Governing Body W3C Community Group (Schema.org CG) | Industry consortium (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex as founding sponsors and Steering Group members)
Country International; founding sponsors headquartered in the USA (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) and Russia (Yandex)
Start Year 2011
Stack Language-agnostic vocabulary. Published as RDFS with serialisations in JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata; tooling and site in Python
Funding Corporate sponsorship — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex
Last Investigated Jul 1, 2026

Use Case Domains

Platform Evolution & Sovereignty

Semantic & Data Protocol Attributes

Origins Search engine structured data / SEO — created so that search engines could interpret page content consistently rather than each maintaining its own markup vocabulary; subsequently generalised to a broad web vocabulary used well beyond search
Database N/A — a vocabulary, not a store; markup is embedded in web pages and consumed by crawlers
Query Language SPARQL where the vocabulary is used in RDF form; otherwise consumed by crawlers and parsers directly from page markup
Data Formats JSON-LD (recommended by most consumers), RDFa, and Microdata. Vocabulary itself published as RDFS with regular versioned releases
Collaborative Live Editing N/A — vocabulary
Rich Text Editing N/A — vocabulary
Mobile Support N/A — vocabulary; markup is platform-independent
Web Support Yes — the web is its native and primary deployment surface
Native Apps N/A — vocabulary
Terms Free — vocabulary terms under CC BY-SA 3.0; no fees or registration to use
Funds Unknown — sponsor contributions are not itemised publicly
Based On RDFS (vocabulary definition layer); JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata (serialisations); W3C Community Group process
Semantic Web Compatibility Full RDF compliance — published as an RDFS vocabulary; JSON-LD and RDFa serialisations are RDF-native and SPARQL-queryable. Its type hierarchy is deliberately looser than a formal OWL ontology, favouring adoption over reasoning rigour
Protocol Maturity / Standardization De facto standard — not a W3C Recommendation. Developed in a W3C Community Group with versioned releases and a public issue tracker; its authority comes from universal consumption by search engines rather than from formal standardisation
Vocabulary / Ontology Type General-purpose web vocabulary — approximately 800 types and 1,500 properties spanning CreativeWork, Event, Organization, Person, Place, Product, Action and their subtypes, plus hosted and external extensions (bib, auto, health-lifesci and others). Domain-agnostic by design
Usage Pattern Embedded in web pages and reused by other vocabularies — the dominant pattern is inline markup consumed by search engines. Also widely reused as a base vocabulary by other specifications, including Murmurations (which uses Schema.org terms in its field library) and Blockchain Commons Gordian Envelope Known Values, both on this tab