New Vocabularies for Technical Publishing

New Vocabularies for Technical Publishing

Three new vocabularies have been proposed as the result of a collaborative effort by several Technology companies. They are specifically for use with Technical Articles, API reference documentation, and Code.

These proposed vocabularies will improve search engines’ understanding of documentation with technical content, and thus greatly increase the discoverability of this documentation.

The following snippets highlight the potential of these new vocabularies.

TechArticle

Informs which product version the content is referring to
This content is for version 4; and the current version is 4.5.



Informs where to get more information on the overall concept
This content on “Hyper-V Server 8 Beta” is about the broader concept of virtualization:





Maps content to the audience’s intent

This is content that describes how to do something:
itemprop="genre" content="How-to"
This content describes steps for troubleshooting:
itemprop="genre" content="Troubleshooting"

APIReference

Disambiguates version and usage

This content refers to a managed assembly:
itemprop="programmingModel" content="Managed"
itemprop="assembly" content="mscorlib.dll" />

Defines platform category

This reference documentation applies to the phone platform:
itemprop="aboutProduct" content=".Net Framework 4.5"
itemprop="targetPlatform" content="phone"

This reference documentation applies to the desktop platform:
itemprop="aboutProduct" content=".Net Framework 4.5"
itemprop="targetPlatform" content="desktop"


Code

Defines section of content as sample code

This Code is a C++ sample inserted in an article:

C++

This is a full visual studio solution in an MSDN Code Gallery:

We would like this community’s feedback concerning the above proposals.

Thanks!