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CUNY Technology Group

This is a group for all members of the CUNY community who are interested in technology and its use in academic research and teaching.

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Web microdata for educational services

  • Hello. We’ve recently started a project to start implementing microdata (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_%28HTML%29) in our college’s website. Several datapoints of our institution are well-represented in the public definition provided by schema.org (see http://schema.org/docs/full.html). Elements like CollegeOrUniversity or EducationEvent are well understood but only represent a portion of the available categorical data.

    By my reading of the current schema, educational services, which is to say programs, courses, degrees, certificates and their ilk, are not well-represented. Cases could be made that either Product or CreativeWork could encapsulate an educational service however the metadata of each belie an imperfect fit. EducationEvent also could be shoehorned but the entire event tree seems to target one-time events with attached dates and durations, not, necessarily, a course description independent of its schedule.

    I’m curious to know how other CUNY web staff are interpreting (or would interpret, if you haven’t yet examined it) the current schema.org definitions as they relate to program or course listings. Do you have a strong tendency toward a current definition or do you believe an extension of the current specification is worthwhile? The parties behind schema.org have made it clear that they are open to extensions but will only publish those extensions and/or utilize the results once a consensus has been made by the sites implementing the extension. If you believe an extension is worthwhile, would you be interested in developing a working group to develop it?

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