Google adds new schema named “Science Datasets” for marking up scientific or government data

Google added a new structured data type named Science datasets. This is a new markup, which technically can be used by Google for rich cards/rich snippets in the Google search results interface.

Science datasets is a “specialized repositories for datasets in many scientific domains: life sciences, earth sciences, material sciences, and more,” Google said. Google added “many governments maintain repositories of civic and government data,” which can be used for this as well.

Here is the example Google gave:

For example, consider this dataset that describes historical snow levels in the Northern Hemisphere. This page contains basic information about the data, like spatial coverage and units. Other pages on the site contain additional metadata: who produces the dataset, how to download it, and the license for using the data. With structured data markup, these pages can be more easily discovered by other scientists searching for climate data in that subject area.

This specific schema is not something that Google will show in the search results today. Google said this is something they are experimenting with, “dataset markup is available for you to experiment with before it’s released to general availability.” Google explained you should be able to see the “previews in the Structured Data Testing Tools but “you won’t, however, see your datasets appear in Search.”

Here are the datasets that qualify for this markup:

• A table or a CSV file with some data
• A file in a proprietary format that contains data
• A collection of files that together constitute some meaningful dataset
• A structured object with data in some other format that you might want to load into a special tool for processing
• Images capturing the data
• Anything that looks like a dataset to you

Aaron Bradley seemed to first spot this and said “with pilot program, Google now allows publishers to describe CSV and other tabular datasets.”

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