Purpose of using Action Schema.org markups and their specific usage?

Question

I've read about Action Schema.org markups in recent past but couldn't figure out much about of the purpose of introducing this schema or adding such schema markups on the websites.

What benefits search engines gets by reading this type of structured data from the websites? If someone knows please help me understand this.

Also, there are many types of Action schemas like SearchAction, TradeAction, FindAction, CreateAction etc. The definition of these schemas seems a bit technical to me so please advise how do I decide about the usage of them.

Answer 1

For explaining this, I think it makes sense two describe two main use cases (but there are possibly many more).

To give structured data about things that happened.

Not different to using all the other types Schema.org offers (or any other vocabulary, for that matter): represent entities described in your document and provide structured data about them. Actions are of course not so "obvious" entities like person, movies, or places, … but still.

Example: Alice liked Bob’s post at 2016-03-23. We have three obvious entities here:

• Alice is a Person
• Bob is a Person
• The post is a SocialMediaPosting

But the date 2016-03-23 doesn’t belong to any of these entities. We need a fourth entity to capture it accordingly (together with the fact that a like happened):

• The like is a LikeAction

(In another answer, I created a simple LikeAction example.)

To give structured data about things that humans and bots can do.

This use case is somewhat different from the "regular" Schema.org use. It can directly allow humans and bots to do things on/with your page. Thanks to the structured Action markup, the various actions and their purpose can be understood by user agents, which might offer buttons etc. in the interfaces for their human users.

A popular example is Google’s Sitelinks Search Box. By providing a SearchAction, you describe how your site’s search function can be used, which allows Google Search to display a search field on their search results that executes a search on your site.

(By the way, Google has many more Action uses for Gmail. For example, the Rsvp Action, making use of RsvpAction, can display a button in the Gmail interface which allows users to confirm their attendance to an event.)

Yandex seems to intend to make use of button actions (e.g., to buy a product) in the future.