Comment Taking positive spin on this (Score 1) 192
I just spent few mins looking at schema.org and their proposed schema. The way, I look at it, they are just extending existing HTML tags (in spirit of, everything is XML eventually), so that they can extract meaningful information from HTML tag. Of course, it will help their spiders and search processors, but in end, it will help average web user, who will get exact results.
Take a example of typical e-commerce site. These days, those sites have jump through hoops on "regular" basis, to provide product feed to google/bing/yahoo or any shopping comparison site. And almost everyone wants to do it, to get more page hits, more visibility. Now, if under plan of schema.org proposed extensions, spiders can parse their actual html pages and index product information, along with "latest" price. Hence no need to feeds and consumer always see prices on google products, as it is actually on retailer website.
This same concept can be applied on different scenarios like emergency updates, latest news as it happens, any kind of status updates.
Google has already starting showing flight times on their search. (i guess, largely due to fact, they got ITA) but using schema.org, they can show more relevant information for other text.
Theoretically, companies like google or any other one, can build whole new genre of webapps.
