Four years of Schema org Recent Progress and Looking Forward

Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow

In 2011, we announced schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. Since that time, schema.org has been a resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages so that search engines can use that data to index content better and surface it in new experiences like rich snippets, GMail, and the Google App.

Schema.org, which provides a growing vocabulary for describing various kinds of entity in terms of properties and relationships, has become increasingly important as the Web transitions to a multi-device, mobile-oriented world. We are now seeing schema.org being used on many millions of Web sites, defining data types and properties common across applications, platforms and products, in order to enhance the user experience by delivering the most relevant information they need, when they need it.

Schema.org in Google Rich Snippets

Schema.org in Google Knowledge Graph panels

Schema.org in Recipe carousels

In Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web, an overview article published this week on ACM, we report some key schema.org adoption metrics from a sample of 10 billion pages from a combination of the Google index and Web Data Commons. In this sample, 31.3% of pages have schema.org markup, up from 22% one year ago. Structured data markup is now a core part of the modern web.

The schema.org group at W3C is now amongst the largest active W3C communities, serving as a hub for diverse groups exploring schemas covering diverse topics such as sports, healthcare, e-commerce, food packaging, bibliography and digital archive management. Other companies, also make use of the same data to build different applications, and as new use cases arise further schemas are integrated via community discussion at W3C. Each of these topics in turn have subtle inter-relationships - for example schemas for food packaging, for flight reservations, for recipes and for restaurant menus, each have different approaches to describing food restrictions and allergies. Rather than try to force a common unified approach across these domains, schema.orgs evolution is pragmatic, driven by the combination of available Web data, and the likelihood of mainstream consuming applications.

Schema.org is also finding new kinds of uses. One exciting line of work is the use of schema.org marked up pages as training corpus for machine learning. John Foley, Michael Bendersky and Vanja Josifovski used schema.org data to build a system that can learn to recognize events that may be geographically local to a particular user. Other researchers are looking at using schema.org pages with similar markup, but in different languages, to automatically create parallel corpora for machine translation.

Four years after its launch, Schema.org is entering its next phase, with more of the vocabulary development taking place in a more distributed fashion, as extensions. As schema.org adoption has grown, a number groups with more specialized vocabularies have expressed interest in extending schema.org with their terms. Examples of this include real estate, product, finance, medical and bibliographic information. A number of extensions, for topics ranging from automobiles to product details, are already underway. In such a model, schema.org itself is just the core, providing a unifying vocabulary and congregation forum as necessary.

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The Computer Science Pipeline and Diversity Part 2 Some positive signs and looking towards the future

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, Google

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

The disparity between the growing demand for computing professionals and the number of graduates in Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) has been highlighted in many recent publications. The tiny pipeline of diverse students (women and underrepresented minorities (URMs)) is even more troubling. Some of the factors causing these issues are:

• The historical lack of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) capabilities in our younger students; lack of proficiency has had a substantial impact on the overall number of students pursuing technical careers. (PCAST Stem Ed report, 2010)
• On the lack of girls in computing, boys often come into computing knowing more than girls because they have been doing it longer. This can cause girls to lose confidence with the perception that computing is a man’s world. Lack of role models, encouragement and relevant curriculum are additional factors that discourage girls’ participation. (Margolis 2003)
• On the lack of URMs in computing, the best and most enthusiastic minority students are effectively discouraged from pursuing technical careers because of systemic and structural issues in our high schools and communities, and because of unconscious bias of teachers and administrators. (Margolis, 2010)

Over the last 3-4 years, however, we have seen some significant positive signals in STEM education in general, and in CS/IT in particular.

• Math¹ and Science² results as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have improved slightly since 2009, both in general and for female and minority students.
• Over the last 10 years, there has been an increase in the number of students earning STEM degrees, but the news on women graduates is not as positive.

“Overall, 40 percent of bachelors degrees earned by men and 29 percent earned by women are now in STEM fields. At the doctoral level, more than half of the degrees earned by men (58 percent) and one-third earned by women (33 percent) are in STEM fields. At the bachelors degree level, though, women are losing ground. Between 2004 and 2014, the share of STEM-related bachelors degrees earned by women decreased in all seven discipline areas: engineering; computer science; earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences; physical sciences; mathematics; biological and agricultural sciences; and social sciences and psychology. The biggest decrease was in computer science, where women now earn 18 percent of bachelors degrees (18 percent). In 2004, women earned nearly a quarter of computer science bachelors degrees, at 23 percent.” - (U.S. News, 2015)

• There has been a steady growth in investment in education companies, particularly those focused on innovative uses of technology.

• The number of publications in Google Scholar on STEM education that focus on gender issues or minority students has steadily increased over the last several years.

Results from Google Scholar, using “STEM education minority” and “STEM education gender” as search terms

• Successful marketing campaigns such as Hour of Code and Made with Code have helped raise awareness on the accessibility and importance of coding, and the diverse career opportunities in CS.
• There has been growth in developer bootcamps over the last few years, as well as online “learn to code” programs (code.org, CS First, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Blockly Games, PencilCode, etc.), and an increase in opportunities for K12 students to learn coding in their schools. We have also seen non-profits emerge focused specifically on girls and URMs (Technovation, Girls who Code, Black Girls Code, #YesWeCode, etc.)
• One of the most positive signals has been the growth of graduates in CS over the past few years.

Source: 2013 Taulbee Survey, Computing Research Association

So we are seeing small improvements in K-12 STEM proficiency and undergraduate STEM and CS degrees earned, a significant growth in investment in education innovation, more and more research on the issues of gender and ethnicity in STEM fields and increased opportunities for all students to learn coding skills online, through non-profit programs, through developer boot camps or in their schools.

However, an interesting, and potentially threatening development resulting from this positive momentum is the lack of capacity and faculty in CS departments to handle the increased number of enrollments and majors in CS. Colleges and universities, as a whole, aren’t adequately prepared to handle the surge in CS education demand - Currently there just aren’t enough instructors to teach all the students who want to learn.

This has happened in the past. In the 80’s, with the introduction of the PC, and again during the dot-com boom, interest in CS surged. CS departments managed the load by increasing class sizes as much as they possibly could, and/or they put enrollment caps in place and made CS classes harder. The effect of the former was some faculty left for industry while the effect of the latter was a decrease in the diversity pipeline.

“These kinds of caps have two effects which limit access by women and under-represented minorities:

• First, the students who succeed the most in intro CS are the ones with prior experience.
• Second, creating these kinds of caps creates a perception of CS as a highly competitive field, which is a deterrent to many students. Those students may not even try to get into CS.”

-(Guzdial, 2014)

If we allow the past to repeat itself, we may again find CS faculty leaving for industry and less diversity students going into the field. In addition, unlike the dot-com boom where interest in CS plummeted with the bust, it’s unlikely we will see a decrease in enrollments, particularly in the introductory CS courses. “CS+X”, which represents the application of CS in other fields, is illustrated by the following sample list of interdisciplinary majors in various universities:

• Yale: "Computer Science and Psychology is an interdepartmental major..."
• USC: "B.S in Physics/Computer Science for students with dual interests..."
• Stanford: "Mathematical and Computational Sciences for students interested in..."
• Northeastern: "Computer Science/Music Technology dual major for students who want to explore connections between..."
• Lehigh: "BS in Computer Science and Business integrates..."
• Dartmouth: "The M.D.-Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology..."

The number of non-major students taking CS courses, particularly the introductory ones, is growing, which makes the capacity issues worse.

At Google, we recently funded a number of universities via our 3X3 award program (3 times the number of students in 3 years), which aims to facilitate innovative, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to address these scaling issues in university CS programs. Our hope is to disseminate and scale the most successful approaches that our university partners develop. A positive development, which was not present when this happened in the past, is the recent innovation in online education and technology. The increase in bandwidth, high-quality content and interactive learning opportunities may help us get ahead of this challenging capacity issue.

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¹Average mathematics scores for fourth- and eighth-graders in 2013 were 1 point higher than in 2011, and 28 and 22 points higher respectively in comparison to the first assessment year in 1990. Hispanic students made gains in mathematics from 2011 to 2013 at both grades 4 and 8. Fourth- and eighth-grade female students scored higher in mathematics in 2013 than in 2011, but the scores for fourth- and eighth-grade male students did not change significantly over the same period. (Nation’s Report Card)

²The average eighth-grade science score increased two points, from 150 in 2009 to 152 in 2011. Scores also rose among public school students in 16 of 47 states that participated in both 2009 and 2011, and no state showed a decline in science scores from 2009 to 2011. A five-point gain from 2009 to 2011 by Hispanic students was larger than the one-point gain for White students, an improvement that narrowed the score gap between those two groups. Black students scored three points higher in 2011 than in 2009, narrowing the achievement gap with White students. (Nation’s Report Card)

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Looking For Project Management Software For Architects

By Catalina Nielsen

One thing that is most likely to be on the mind of any person who is looking for project management software for architects is how to find the right ones. This is because every professional knows that unless they uncover things that can add some real value to their work, there will be nothing good to expect.

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You should not just hurry into buying some of those project management software for architects. Indeed, even leading experts often ask their clients to understand the specific conditions under which they will be using them. Yo even will be surprised to to know that not everyone looks for the same things.

About the Author:

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