Custom Microdata and Custom Schema.org

Question

My site gives satellite frequency info.Like this;

Frequency: 11881 Polarization: V Symbol Rate: 27500 Fec: 3/4

I want to use microdata for this datas. i used PageMap like this;

<PageMap>
    <DataObject type="action">
        <Attribute name="channel_name" value="Watan TV"/>
        <Attribute name="frequency" value="11012"/>
        <Attribute name="polarization" value="H"/>
        <Attribute name="symbol_rate" value="27500"/>
        <Attribute name="fec" value="5/6"/>
    </DataObject>
</PageMap>

And i want to use microdata. But i cant find any type in Schema.org. So i used like this:

<div itemscope>
    <span itemprop="channel_name">Watan TV</span>
    <span itemprop="frequency">11012</span>
    <span itemprop="polarization">H</span>
    <span itemprop="symbol_rate">27500</span>
    <span itemprop="fec">5/6</span>
</div>

Is this wrong? Or which schema type must i choose? Thanks...

Answer 1

For Microdata, you can either

• find a suitable vocabulary, or
• create your own vocabulary, or
• use only proprietary properties.

The last case is what you use in your example. Because you don’t specify the itemtype attribute, you are not using a vocabulary. You can come up with any name (as long as it doesn’t contain . or :), but don’t expect consumers to re-use your data: because you are not using a vocabulary, you are the only one who knows what all the properties really mean.

If your goal is providing the data for search engines, you’ll probably want to use Schema.org, as this is currently the only vocabulary which the big search engine services support (they are its sponsors). But if Schema.org doesn’t provide a suitable type, you can’t use it (you could use a broad type that applies, e.g., everything is a Thing, but it’ll miss all the properties you need for your case). Your only option here is to suggest an extension for Schema.org (but even it they implement it, it of course doesn’t mean that search engines start doing something with this data).