Structured data for life science using schema.org
Creators: name: Beard, Niall
name: Goble, Carole
name: Attwood, Teresa
name: Nenadic Aleksandra
name: Jimenez, Rafael
name: Cook, Martin
name: Morrison, Norman
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2016

description: Bioschemas is an open community initiative that aims to improve data interoperability in the life sciences. It does so by encouraging life scientists to use schema.org mark-up, so that their websites and services contain consistently structured information. This makes it easier to discover, collate and analyse distributed data. The main outcome of Bioschemas is a collection of specifications that provide guidelines to facilitate a more consistent adoption of schema.org mark-up within the life sciences. <br><br>ELIXIR explicitly supports FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles for its data, software, tools, events and training resources. ‘Finding’ has the challenge of effective discovery and indexing of Web-based resources across ELIXIR information providers – this is hard because there has been no ELIXIR-wide agreement on how to expose such resources to make them more accessible.<br><br>A consortium of search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex) have developed Schema.org, which provides a set of schemas for describing various Web resources. Schema.org adopters mark-up the contents of their site with hidden fields/attributes (encoded in either RDFa, Microdata or JSON-LD formats), which search engines and other aggregators can then parse and use to index the resources, thereby giving semantically rich search results and facilitating information discovery and access.<br><br>Bioschemas is a joint initiative of several organisations and life-science communities to extend schema.org to facilitate the description, sharing and promotion of life-science resources and activities. There are currently groups developing several content types including Events, Training Materials, Organizations, Person profiles, Standards, and DATS. More standards are being proposed and developed.<br><br>Bioschemas proposes amendments to existing schema.org specifications, re-using as many existing types as possible. The proposed specifications contain extra layers of information such as a minimum information model, recommended taxonomic vocabularies, and the cardinality of attributes to improve interoperability.<br><br>Using Bioschemas to mark-up data improves search-engine optimisation. More than 30% of search results contain schema.org snippets, despite only 0.3% of websites containing this structured data. Marking-up data using Bioschemas schema.org is simple. Dozens of tools for popular Web frameworks and content-management systems are available to expedite the process.<br><br>The development process is open and backed by a large consortium of search engines, so the longevity of the standard is likely to outlive an equivalent bespoke solution. Systems that aggregate or index metadata need providers to structure their data to make the process simpler. This is easy for large providers who can implement APIs or export their content in bespoke formats, but for the long tail - a large number of small websites containing content that would otherwise be over-looked – schema.org is an accessible and pragmatic way of structuring data for capture by content aggregators.<br>