Structured data, v.1.0

Recently I saw a job posting that mentioned ‘structured data’ as part of the job responsibilities. While I have an intuitive sense of what ‘structured data’ is, I wanted to get a more defined understanding of it.

This is sort of a brain dump with sources, while I sort out what is structured data into something useful.

From AWS

  • Tabular, relational data
  • SEO tags (this is the context of what started my curiousity and what got my attention)
  • “Enterprises are creating data at an exponential rate, and the vast majority of data—between 80-90%—is unstructured. As it is qualitative data, it requires different technologies and strategies to analyze effectively. For example, you store unstructured data in NoSQL databases and data lakes.

From Wikimedia Commons

  • “Structured data on Commons is multilingual information about a media file that can be understood by humans, with enough consistency that it can also be uniformly processed by machines.”
  • Check out Tools to add structured data to files
  • “Development of Structured Data on Commons is tracked on Phabricator.”

From schema.org

  • Makes web doc pieces more ‘discoverable’ via SEO
    • Already using this in portfolio website. Look at header
      <script type="application/ld+json" src="./structured-data.json"></script>
      
  • Embed microdata
  • Use types and properties
    • itemprop, itemscope, itemtype etc.