Bioschemas - Bioschemas
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Bioschemas Types Included into Schema.org!
As part of the
version 13.0
release of the Schema.org vocabulary, the following Bioschemas types have been included into the pending area:
BioChemEntity
ChemicalSubstance
Gene
MolecularEntity
Protein
Taxon
What is Bioschemas?
Bioschemas aims to improve the Findability on the Web of life sciences resources such as datasets, software, and training materials. It does this by encouraging people in the life sciences to use Schema.org markup in their websites so that they are indexable by search engines and other services. Bioschemas encourages the consistent use of markup to ease the consumption of the contained markup across many sites. This structured information then makes it easier to discover, collate, and analyse distributed resources.
Bioschemas is making two main contributions:
Proposing
new types and properties
to Schema.org to allow for the description of life science resources.
Defining usage
profiles
over the Schema.org types that identify the essential properties to use in describing a resource.
⇨ If you want to learn about
the difference between types and properties
, see our tutorials.
Endorsement of Bioschemas
Including Bioschemas markup within a web resource is a simple first step to making your data Findable, c.f. the
FAIR Principles
. In particular, search engines index markup from webpages to populate their registries, e.g.
Google Dataset Search
Use of Bioschemas to make resources more discoverable has been endorsed by the European Research Council in their
Open Research Data and Data Management Plans
policy ('metadata' section, page 11). Including Bioschemas markup in a resource's metadata means that you meet some of the Findability criteria of the FAIR Data Principles.
Bioschemas is a flagship policy of
ELIXIR
(the European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information), and a key component of their
2024-2028 Scientific Programme
The use of Bioschemas markup is also recommended by the
International Society for Biocuration
in order to help make resources more discoverable.
Bioschemas Community
Bioschemas started as a community effort in November 2015. It operates as an open community initiative with
representatives
from a wide variety of institutions. You are welcome to
join the community
For details about related community efforts, please see our
related communities page
Schema.org
Schema.org
is a community effort supported by the main search engines, and is already widely implemented across the web.
Schema.org provides a way to add semantic markup to web pages. It describes ‘types’ of information, which then have ‘properties’. The types are things that we can talk about and the properties are the things that we can say about the type.
For example,
Event
is a type that has properties like
startDate
endDate
, and
description
If types or properties needed in the life sciences are missing, then Bioschemas is developing proposals for
new types and properties
to be included into Schema.org.
Bioschema Profiles
To simplify the marking up of web resources, and to provide consistency of markup within the life sciences community, Bioschemas are defining
profiles
over types that state which properties must be used (minimum), should be used (recommended), and could be used (optional). The profiles also state the cardinality of usage of a property, and identify domain ontologies to use for the value of properties.
For example, if we look at the
schema.org/Dataset
type there are over 100 properties available to use. The
Bioschemas profile over Dataset
brings this down to a more manageable number, with 5 mandatory properties and 8 recommended properties. Many of the other properties have little relevance for a Dataset. The dataset markup properties that Bioschemas specifies as mandatory will also make them findable by
Google's Dataset Search tool
The Bioschemas community are defining profiles over relevant existing Schema.org types, e.g.
DataCatalog
Course
, and
SoftwareApplication
, and over the new types being defined for the life sciences, e.g.
Gene
Protein
, and
Taxon
Funding
The Bioschemas Community have received funding through the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE grant and ELIXIR Implementation Studies. Full details of funding can be on our
funding page
News
BH25DE report: On the path to machine-actionable training materials
26 January 2026
BH25DE
Preprint
BioHackrXiv
BioHackEU25 report: Mining the potential of knowledge graphs for metadata on training
09 December 2025
BHEU2025
Preprint
BioHackrXiv
Bioschemas presenting at ISMB/ECCB 2025 in Liverpool, UK
20 July 2025
Event
Read more news on our
news page
Upcoming Meetings
Monthly Call
The Bioschemas Community/Technical Call takes place on the 3rd Monday of each month at 16:00 UTC in winter and 15:00 UTC in summer (aligned to Central Europe time changes)
see it in your own time zone
).
We alternate between community and technical discussions. Call in details available in the
agenda
Next call: 20 April, 2026 15:00 UTC
Agenda
- Community call
Bioschemas Monthly Call - Community Call
20 April 2026
Online
See more
meetings
Latest Presentation
Click
here
to watch a webinar about Bioschemas.
See more
presentations and publications
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