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A Web-scale Study of the Adoption and Evolution of the schema.org Vocabulary over Time

Promoted by major search engines, schema.org has become a widely adopted standard for marking up structured data in HTML web pages. In this paper, we use a series of large-scale Web crawls to analyze the evolution and adoption of schema.org over time. The availability of data from different points in time for both the schema and the websites deploying data allows for a new kind of empirical analysis of standards adoption, which has not been possible before. To conduct our analysis, we compare different versions of the schema.org vocabulary to the data that was deployed on hundreds of thousands of Web pages at different points in time. We measure both top-down adoption (i.e., the extent to which changes in the schema are adopted by data providers) as well as bottom-up evolution (i.e., the extent to which the actually deployed data drives changes in the schema). Our empirical analysis shows that both processes can be observed.