One of the key objectives of the Web Observatory will be to enable the discovery and sharing of data sets and tools with other Observatories and we are indebted to Prof Jim Hendler’s group at RPI for their work in developing a schema.org extension designed to enable this important feature.
The main wiki entry for the proposal is:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals
and the Web Observatory Schema is at
https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/WebObsSchema
For those unfamiliar with schema.org there is an introduction available from the Cetis website
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/announcing-schema-org-new-technical-briefing-paper-cetis/