how schema.org can help in nlp - nlp

Question

I am basically working on nlp, collecting interest based data from web pages.
I came across this source http://schema.org/ as being helpful in nlp stuff.
I go through the documentation, from which I can see it adds additional tag properties to identify html tag content.
It may help search engine to get specific data as per user query.
it says : Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!
But I don't understand how it can help me being nlp guy? Generally I parse web page content to process and extract data from it. schema.org may help there, but don't know how to utilize it.
Any example or guidance would be appreciable.

Answer 1

Schema.org uses microdata format for representation. People use microdata for text analytics and extracting curated contents. There can be numerous application.
Suppose you want to create news summarization system. So you can use hNews microformats to extract most relevant content and perform summrization onit
Suppose if you have review based search engine, where you want to list products with most positive review. You can use hReview microfomrat to extract the reviews, now perform sentiment analysis on it to identify product has -ve or +ve review
If you want to create skill based resume classifier then extract content with hResume microformat. Which can give you various details like contact (uses the hCard microformat), experience, achievements , related to this work, education , skills/qualifications, affiliations
, publications , performance/skills for performance etc. You can perform classifier on it to classify CVs with particular skillsets
Thought schema.org does not helps directly to nlp guys, it provides platform to perform text processing in better way.
Check out this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat#Specific_microformats to see various mircorformat, same page will give you more details.

Answer 2

Schema.org is something like a vocabulary or ontology to annotate data and here specifically Web pages.
It's a good idea to extract microdata from Web pages but is it really used by Web developper ? I don't think so and I think that the majority of microdata are used by company such as Google or Yahoo.
Finally, you can find data but not a lot and mainly used by a specific type of website.
What do you want to extract and for what type of application ? Because you can probably use another type of data such as DBpedia or Freebase for example.

Answer 3

GoodRelations also supports schema.org. You can annotate your content on the fly from the front-end based on the various domain contexts defined. So, schema.org is very useful for NLP extraction. One can even use it for HATEOS services for hypermedia link relations. Metadata (data about data) for any context is good for content and data in general. Alternatives, include microformats, RDFa, RDFa Lite, etc. The more context you have the better as it will turn your data into smart content and help crawler bots to understand the data. It also leads further into web of data and in helping global queries over resource domains. In long run such approaches will help towards domain adaptation of agents for transfer learning on the web. Pretty much making the web of pages an externalized unit of a massive commonsense knowledge base. They also help advertising agencies understand publisher sites and to better contextualize ad retargeting.