On Friday, I reported at Search Engine Land that Schema.org launched Actions, a new markup that describes actions that have taken place in the past [past actions] or could take place in the future [potential actions].

Note, Schema.org is the centralized organization backed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, for standardizing markup that mostly search engines use to better understand text and content on a web page and is often used in rich snippets.

That being said, I was curious how Google and Bing might use them, but both companies wouldn’t tell me. Google wouldn’t tell me anything, but Bing did give me some details. Bing emailed me answers to my questions:

Here are the various definitions allowed in Actions:

actionStatus: Indicates the current disposition of the Action.
agent: The direct performer or driver of the action (animate or inanimate). e.g. *John* wrote a book.
endTime: When the Action was performed: end time. This is for actions that span a period of time. e.g. John wrote a book from January to *December*.
instrument: The object that helped the agent perform the action. e.g. John wrote a book with *a pen*.
location: The location of the event, organization or action.
object: The object upon the action is carried out, whose state is kept intact or changed. Also known as the semantic roles patient, affected or undergoer (which change their state) or theme (which doesn’t). e.g. John read *a book*.
participant: Other co-agents that participated in the action indirectly. e.g. John wrote a book with *Steve*.
result: The result produced in the action. e.g. John wrote *a book*.
startTime: When the Action was performed: start time. This is for actions that span a period of time. e.g. John wrote a book from *January* to December.
target: Indicates a target EntryPoint for an Action.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Note: I am offline today and this post was pre-scheduled to be automatically posted. So if I am delayed in responding to issues or comments, I apologize in advance.