How do I use the 'about' Schema.org property?

Question

I'm trying to markup an article and confused as to how to use the about property (from CreativeWork).

http://schema.org/about

My guess is that it can be used like this...

<p itemprop="about">Short text about the article...</p>

But on schema.org it says that the expected type is Thing so I'm not sure what I should be inserting inside the itemprop="about" tag; I can't find any examples of the about property in use.

Can anyone help and provide an example?

Answer 1

When using Microdata, the syntax would look like:

<p itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Thing">
  …
</p>

(Instead of Thing, you could use a more specific type.)

Now you can use properties for this Thing, for example giving it a name, sameAs to link to the corresponding Wikipedia page, and description for a short description:

<p itemprop="about" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Thing">
  <span itemprop="description">A <span itemprop="name">Bee</span> is a flying insect.</span>
  <link itemprop="sameAs" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee" />
</p>