schema.org and an online dictionary

Question

I'm having trouble about what to use from schema.org. I'm making a web site kinda similar to urbandictionary.com. Users are the contributors of the dictionary. Also the dictionary may include phrases like "2012 London Olympics", "MIT Dorms" etc. Whatever. So I want to add schema to the website. What should be schema-named the words/phrases and the users' descriptions?

http://schema.org/docs/full.html

Edit: layout of a sample page:

Gmail

1. Google's email service -user63
2. best email service in terms of spam prevention -user21
3. Gmail has a support of IMAP, POP3, SMTPi OAUTH, FRD, two-way secure login -userMew

Edit2: loyout of another sample page:

Batman 5

1. Upcoming movie of Batman, where Justien Bieber is going to play Joker -user43, May 2015
2. The opening was a disaster; Bieber slipped to the stairs and then was carried to a hospital -user22, December 2015
3. This movie was a disaster, a very poor quality movie -userKitten, March 2016

Answer 1

General

There is a getting started page in the documentation on schema.org. As you are building a dictionary, you might have an entry about a movie there (the example they are using). The markup could look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
  <span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span></span>
  <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
  <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>

This requires that you know that your data entry is a movie of course. If you do not know that, you could use the itemtype Article (or even Thing) and the global properties name and description.

There is also additional information about the format of e.g. dates and how to integrate invisible data using the meta tag and setting a content attribute: <meta itemprop="bestRating" content="5" />.

You can always give multiple types to an item by specifying the property additionalType. You can even extend the schema. But you should use them carefully as they are not recognized by search engines, but might get used in the future:

If the schema gains adoption and proves useful to search applications, search engines may start using this data.

In general, all this markup is optional, so feel free to mark up as much as possible, but only those parts that make sense. From the schema.org FAQ:

It is fine to mark up only some properties of an item - markup is not an all-or-nothing choice.

Markup validation

To test your markup, Google provides a Rich Snippets Testing Tool. You can paste your HTML there and see what Google extracts from it. For the above example, this is the result:

Item
    Type: http://schema.org/movie
    name = Avatar
    director = James Cameron
    genre = Science fiction
    trailer
    text = Trailer
    href = http://www.example.com/movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html

On your page

As the information on your page is user-generated, you could let the users choose from the higher level schema.org types (Movie, Place (MIT Dorms), SportsEvent (2012 London Olympics) etc.) and fallback to Thing. Then get the data in form elements matching the properties of those types. Save the data and evaluate it when you build your dictionary pages. It is then crawled by Google (and others) and used for indexing.

For the Gmail example you gave, the markup could simply look like this (copy and paste it into the testing tool to see that Google understands the nesting):

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://www.schema.org/SoftwareApplication">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Gmail</h1>
  <div itemprop="comment" itemscope itemtype="http://www.schema.org/Comment">
    <span itemprop="comment">Google's email service</span>
    <span itemprop="author">user63</span>
  </div>
  <div itemprop="comment" itemscope itemtype="http://www.schema.org/Comment">
    <span itemprop="comment">best email service in terms of spam prevention</span>
    <span itemprop="author">user21</span>
  </div>
  <div itemprop="comment" itemscope itemtype="http://www.schema.org/Comment">
    <span itemprop="comment">Gmail has a support of IMAP, POP3, SMTPi OAUTH, FRD, two-way secure login</span>
    <span itemprop="author">userMew</span>
  </div>
</div>

Additional information

For more information see the Google schema.org FAQs. Also see the Dublin Core Metadata Initiatice (DCMI) (Wikipedia) as an alternative way to semantically markup your data. They also have a wiki page for mapping between schema.org and DC.

Answer 2

Dictionaries can now be represented in schema.org in several ways. At the moment the google search results are not based on structured data/schema.org but that may change in future.

Most of the suggestions below are more specific types of http://schema.org/CreativeWork - which is important because it contains properties like comment, contributor, and text which are useful for user-editable content and contributions. CreativeWork also contains learningResourceType which can be set to dictionary - but this isn't a suggested value by schema.org so search engines may not know where to look.

SEO and Semanic HTML for dictionaries

Using the tags with and is the standard way of doing dictionary terms/definitions and used by the top dictionary websites, you can these tags with the schema inside them,

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Collection"><h1 itemprop="name">Dictionary</h1>
 <dl id="gmail" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">
  <dt itemprop="name">Gmail</dt>
   <meta itemprop="sameAs" content="http://gmail.com">
   <meta itemprop="url" content="http://mydictionary.com/page1.html#gmail">
  <dd itemprop="description"><span itemprop="comment">Google's email service</span> -<span itemprop="contributor">user63</span></dd>
 </dl>
</div>

Having a separate page (or breadcrumb) for each terms seems key to ranking highly. The page name (including any bookmark) is used in the ranking, so if you search for 'ardvark' the URL http://mydictionary.com/A will rank below http://mydictionary.com/Aardvark even if both pages are otherwise identical.

Explanation of 3 Suitable schema types, including the 'official' dictionary

Method 1)

Use http://schema.org/Thing or http://schema.org/Intangible with only name (your term) and description (your definition) set. This will be hundreds (or more) of separate ones, so you could group them under a collection with http://schema.org/Collective (this how VideoGallery and ImageGallery structured data is done). The nice thing about this is it's simple and very each to show each on a separate page, which should increase hits.

Method 2)

The only way that the schema will recognize the value of Dictionary as a Dictionary is to use http://schema.org/publicationType - which can be any one of the values listed here - one of which is Dictionary. Another is Terminology.

The catch is that at the moment publicationType can only be used inside http://schema.org/MedicalScholarlyArticle - but raise a request and this may be expanded, for example to other ScholarlyArticles, or to CreativeWork (which is a parent of MedicalScholarlyArticle). MedicalScholarlyArticle is a type of CreativeWork - as explained above. If using MedicalScholarlyArticle you can nest items inside, one for each term, possibly using http://schema.org/Thing or http://schema.org/Intangible (set name and description, sameAs can be used to point to a wikipedia or urban dictionary entry that identifies the term, or to social media).

You can open an issue here to request that publicationType be added to all CreativeWork.

Method 3)

A dictionary is a book (whether offline or online), so use http://schema.org/Book and add each term within it by nesting inside. Book is a type of http://schema.org/CreativeWork and as in Method 1 you can set the terms with Thing, Intangible, or even make each term into it's own CreativeWork (just check because google may want an image for each as it does with each ScholarlyArticle).