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Dear all:

We are proud to announce the official release of the GoodRelations 
ontology, a comprehensive effort for making e-commerce on the Semantic 
Web a reality.

GoodRelations is a lightweight yet sophisticated vocabulary for 
describing the details of offers made on the Web. It empowers 
manufacturers and shop operators to express the exact meaning of their 
offers in a machine-readable way. This allows search engines to support 
more precise search, and partners in the value chain to automate their 
content integration tasks.

1. Project page
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
2. Ontology
http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1
3. Specification (via client-side rendering)
http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1
3. User's Guide
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/primer/

GoodRelations complements the eClassOWL ontology, which is the first 
non-toy ontology for products and services. Since the initial release of 
eClassOWL at ESWC 2005, that ontology has gained remarkable attention. 
The latest version 5.1.4 provides more than 30,000 product classes and 
more than 5,000 attributes for describing product features.

The relationship between these two ontologies is straightforward:
⁃ eClassOWL provides classes, attributes, and values for describing what 
a product or service is.
⁃ GoodRelations provides everything needed for describing the 
relationship between a business entity and a product or service, i.e., 
the actual offer and its details. That’s also the origin of the name – 
it’s an ontology for the relations between goods and business entities.

While eClassOWL is the largest ontology for products and services, one 
can use any other products or services ontology in combination with 
GoodRelations. Only a few guidelines must be met.
For example, the Austrian ebSemantics initiative is close to release 
several products and services ontologies for particular domains (events, 
tickets, accommodation, etc.) that will be GoodRelations-compliant.

The main features of GoodRelations are as follows:
⁃ Based on currently available Semantic Web standards, tools, and 
infrastructure (“ready to run as of today”)
⁃ Minimal requirements on reasoner support – any RDF-S-style reasoner, 
OWL DLP, DL, or ter-Horst reasoner will work
⁃ Support for all common business functions, like sell, lease, dispose, 
repair, etc.
⁃ Suits both for explicit instances, product models, and anonymous instances
⁃ Supports different prices for different types of customers or quantities
⁃ Supports product bundles in combination with all kinds of units of 
measurements (“2 kg butter plus 2 cell phones for € 99” would be no problem)
⁃ Supports price specifications both as single values or ranges
⁃ Supports intervals and units of measurements for product features
⁃ Compatible with eClassOWL and other ontologies
⁃ Supports ISO 4217 currencies
⁃ Supports defining eligible regions
⁃ Supports common delivery and shipping methods
⁃ Supports accepted payment methods
⁃ Offerings can be constrained to certain eligible business entities 
(e.g. resellers only)
⁃ Supports warranty promises, i.e., the duration and scope
⁃ Supports charges for certain payment or delivery options; the latter 
also individually per region
⁃ Compatible with international standards: ISO 3166, ISO 4217, 
UN/CEFACT, eCl at ss, etc.

GoodRelations is the result of about five years of work in progress, 
carried out at multiple institutions. The ontology is released under a 
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Any feedback is very much appreciated! Also, if you need support in 
adopting GoodRelations to your applications or data, please contact us. 
We are already working with several organizations on making 
GoodRelations part of their technology.

Best wishes

Martin Hepp
-------------------------------------------------------
e-mail mhepp at computer.org
skype mfhepp
web http://www.heppnetz.de
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