Tom posted a while back about his book review section, and adding schema.org microdata to those pages for book review-related data. The promise of these schema standards is to provide a semantic markup framework for unstructured text content, so things like recipes, movies, and products can conform to an attribute standard for (theoretically) better indexing and search.

Referencing his implementation, I went through my library templates and added schema attributes on the relevant properties I publish. I don’t know what value those’ll have, but I’m a supporter of the open web and bottom-up adoption of formats for data structures. I remember Microformats from way back in the early Web 2.0 days. They didn’t seem to catch on, but Google has over time rolled out JSON-LD (linked data) to feed those tasty machine-readable formats to the spider, for easier surfacing of useful content in search.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the data on an individual /book page:

<div class="book" itemprop=itemReviewed itemscope itemtype=http://schema.org/Book>
<h1 itemprop=name>The Quiet American</h1>
<h2>by <span class="author" itemprop=author>Graham Greene</span></h2>
<p class="book-meta">Published: <span itemprop=datePublished></span></p>
</div>

It’s pretty straightforward to add markup for title, author, completion date, ISBN, and other things. It’s also neat that the Book object type also “belongs to” the CreativeWork type, so it can contain those properties, as well.

One other thing I included here was a section to backlink to others’ posted book reviews on their personal sites. After Tom tweeted yesterday about doing this on his site, I decided I’d backlink to his, too. If you maintain a reading log and want to continue the viral spread of semantic indie blog cross-referencing, let me know. I’d be happy to link to others.

Next I wanted to try adding the appropriate JSON-LD tags for other parts of the site and see how that all works.