A couple years ago Google released a few search tools to help users find more relevant information faster. Rich snippets were a way site owners could split up their information into smaller chunks for a search engine to understand. The search engine in turn can use this extended information to serve up summaries or better results to their users.
In the beginning of this whole process, several people had good ideas on how to mark the information for search engines. They were dubbed microformat, microdata and RDF. Confused? Everyone else was too. So, the good people of Google, Yahoo, and Bing got together (finally) and created a unified method to mark up this information on websites. You can read more about the announcement on Google’s Blog or see what information you can start sharing with users at Schema.org. If you have just about any type of structured information whether it is a book, event, or even a committee there is probably a schema you can use to share more granular data about it.
Thanks for the nice article. Look forward to reading more of them.