What are Data Items and URIs?

Modified on Wed, 5 Feb at 6:42 PM

This support document explains how the Schema App Editor is used to create Data Items and describes the importance of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) in the context of deploying Editor markup from Schema App.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Definitions
- What is a Data Item?
- What is a URI? Is a URI the same thing as an @id?
FAQs and Use Cases of URIs
Video: URIs and the Schema App Editor

Definitions

This section defines what Data Items, URIs and URLs are.

What is a Data Item?

A Data Item is a specific instance of a Class or Type. The Schema App Editor is used to create Data Items manually, and the Schema App Highlighter is used to create Data Items dynamically at scale. All Data Items created within Schema App have URIs or @ids associated with them so that they can be easily referenced across your knowledge graph. Another way to think about a data item is that it is a bundle of information about a specific Thing or concept. The bundle of information consists of a Schema.Org type (aka class) and associated attributes/relationships it has to other data items.

What is a URI? Is a URI the same thing as an @id?

A URI is a string of characters used to unique identify a resource on the web. A URI means we have a consistent way to identify resources across different systems (e.g. Google's Knowledge Graph, your Organization's Knowledge Graph, etc). All data items generated by Schema App have a URI so that they can be easily referenced across your knowledge graph.

FAQs and Use Cases of URIs

This section describes how URIs are used in the Schema App toolset and answers common questions about URIs, URLs, and Data Items.

Why are URIs necessary? How are they used?

URIs are important for several reasons:

A URI allows you to reference or point to a data item.
The Editor tool uses URIs to understand what WebPage our system needs to send markup to.
The Editor tool uses URIs to understand hierarchy of nested data items

What is the difference between a URI and a URL?

A URI, or Unique Resource Identifier, is a unique string of characters that identifies a resource on the Internet. URIs identify the resource by name, location, or both. If you are identifying a location on the Internet, your URI is, by definition, a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

For example, https://www.schemaapp.com/ is a URI because it is a unique string of characters identifying a resource on the Internet. The type of URI is also URL because it identifies the location that this resource exists on the Internet, or its web address.

How are URIs used to merge markup?

When two different data items share the exact same URI, our system will interpret those data items as being the exact thing. Sometimes this is helpful (i.e. when we're multityping something) but it causes markup to be malformed.

This support article describes how to use @IDs to merge Editor markup with markup from other sources.

How are URIs used to define the hierarchy of nested Schema Markup?

Ideally, each page will have one primary entity, or "Thing" that page is about. If you have lots of very nested markup, sometimes the tool can get confused about which data item is the primary or first one. A common solution to this problem is to remove the anchor from the URI of the data item you consider to be the primary entity.

Why are my URIs referencing some http://schemaapp.com/db/ value?

All data items created in Schema App must have a URI. The tool will try to generate a URI for you based on the URL you specify in your Project Settings. If you do not have a URL defined in your project settings, the tool will generate URIs for you based your Account ID. Your Account ID will always start with http://schemaapp.com/db/.

Video: URIs and the Schema App Editor

This training video describes how to create data items using the Schema App Editor. It describes URIs and their relevance to authoring schema markup.