Structured Data – A deep dive into its history, myths, and future
tructured Data – a term describing a technology SEO specialists have been using successfully for many years – without knowing much about its history, its application beyond Search and Social, or how a vocabulary like schema.org came to be and continues to evolve.
Which effectively is an ode to those who managed to convince the world to start using a technology that is abstract, technical, and even involves philosophy. An effort that led to a whopping 50% of the open web now containing (some) semantic metadata – by keeping things relatively simple.
A simplicity that shows itself in the type of structured data markup advocated by companies like Google, Bing, and Meta. Markup that only utilizes parts of the W3C specifications surrounding Linked Open Data, and by doing so made the technology more accessible to all – but at a cost.
Things often fail when one dares to go beyond their documentation. Sometimes because people lack the technical knowledge they need, other times because people take things out of context – falsely believing they found the next big thing in schema.org, or that they’ve mastered some obscure secret about Semantic SEO others don’t know about.
In his talk, Jarno van Driel will take you on a voyage through time, starting at the beginning of the World Wide Web, up into the present day, and onward into the future. He’ll be making stops along the way to illustrate, explain, and debunk some of the myths, misconceptions, and beliefs about the pros and cons of Semantic Metadata.