ABSTRACT
Several industry-specific metadata initiatives have historically facilitated structured data modeling for the web in domains such as commerce, publishing, social media, and so forth. The metadata vocabularies produced by these initiatives allow developers to "wrap” information on the web to provide machine-readable signals for search engines, advertisers, and user-facing content on apps and websites, thus assisting with surfacing facts about people, places, and products. A universal iteration of such a project called Schema.org started in 2011, resulting from a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex to collaborate on a single structured data model across domains. Yet, few studies have explored the metadata vocabulary terms in this significant web resource. What terms are included, upon what subject domains do they focus, and how does Schema.org represent knowledge in its conceptual model? This article presents findings from our extraction and analysis of the documented release history and complete hierarchy on Schema.org's developer pages. We provide a semantic network visualization of Schema.org, including an analysis of its modularity and domains, and discuss its global significance concerning fact-checking and COVID-19. We end by theorizing Schema.org as a gatekeeper of data on the web that authors vocabulary that everyday web users encounter in their searches. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Association for Information Science and Technology.
ABSTRACT
In this study we aim to understand how GitHub is used by COVID-19 interest groups for organizing community archives to protect their knowledge from the Chinese government's censorship efforts. We introduce two case studies of such COVID-19 community archives published with GitHub that appeared online in early 2020. Using public GitHub repository documentation and web archive web crawls from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we describe how these digital community archives emerge and exist on the platform, how knowledge of them circulated on other US based social media sites and show strategies and tactics these volunteers used to keep these community archives alive, resist censorship, and guard the safety of these collections. We argue that these COVID-19 community archives are at risk because of their platform accessibility as much as the content they document, and that understanding how organizers use GitHub's platform affordances is essential to theorizing how platforms are impacting approaches to preserving cultural memory. © 2021 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.