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Justin Clark-Casey edited this page Jun 4, 2018 · 17 revisions

Introduction

This is a master page for information on all the technical aspects of publishing and consuming Bioschemas markup. This will grow over time. Please feel free to edit or contact anybody in the Bioschemas technical group for more information or help.

Topics

Format

Bioschemas strongly recommends using JSON-LD to publish markup, as also recommended by Google. schema.org also allows RDFa and Microdata, but standardizing on JSON-LD allows Bioschemas example markup to be simpler and more consistent. JSON-LD also separates its markup from the page HTML, which may be better for scientific sites publishing large volumes of markup that may change relatively infrequently compared to the human-readable webpage.

Publishing Bioschemas markup

Publishing markup is no good if consuming applications cannot find it or parse it efficiently. Here are some general recommendations and pointers.

Make Bioschemas markup reachable from the site's sitemap.xml

In principle, you should be able to publish Bioschemas markup in any of your webpages, much like any schema.org markup. This will always be true for general search engines such as Bing and Google, as and when they process Bioschemas markup. However, so that markup can be found by life sciences specific search engines and other applications, we strongly recommend that all markup can be reached by crawling the website's sitemap.xml.

Don't publish Bioschemas markup dynamically

We strongly recommend that you publish Bioschemas markup on statically rendered webpages, not using dynamic means such as Javascript. This is so that applications can find your markup without having to render the entire webpage in a headless browser - an expensive operation for which life sciences projects do not have the resources.

Questions

Does Bioschemas markup need to be published on the same page as the human readable content?

In principle, since JSON-LD separates semantic markup from the human readable HTML, it can be tempting to make the publishing process simpler by aggregating markup for many different entities and publishing it on pages separate from their human-readable representations. This may reduce the effort of publishing and the efficiency by which crawlers can find that markup, particularly if it referenced from the sitemap.xml.

However, Google states in their guidelines that their must be human readable content for that markup on the same page, in order to give the best possible general search experience. This requirement, which stems from the need to avoid misleading the user, may apply more to general Internet sites that can look to game the search system, rather than scientific data sites that are looking to provide useful data. Nonetheless, in order to make content discoverable by Google and similar search engines, we recommend that the markup always be on the same page as the associated human-readable content.

Links

Adding profile specific relations to BioChemEntity and DataRecord

Future ideas

  • The Bioschemas common crawl - how to access a common crawl for applications that need a large amount of collected Bioschemas markup but don't want to operate their own crawling facilities. Either this is collected by commoncrawl.org or published by a search engine gathering this information anyway, such as Buzzbang.