GoodRelations is a standardized vocabulary for product, price, and company data that can (1) be embedded into existing static and dynamic Web pages and that (2) can be processed by other computers. This increases the visibility of your products and services in the latest generation of search engines, recommender systems, and other novel applications.
Martin Hepp (UniBW)
hepp at ebusiness-unibw.org
Tue Oct 6 12:05:10 CEST 2009
-- apologies for resending, the original message was not delivered -- Hi Eugenio: Since I assume that your questions is of a more general interest, I am copying the GoodRelations mailing list in my reply: Eugenio Tacchini wrote: > I'm reading your papers about it and at the moment it's not very clear > to me how exactly product models are identified. > > Imagine a scenario in which several e-commerce web sites sell (among > others) the same product (e.g. a Macbook air) and a user ask to a > goodrelations-aware search enginge which are the 3 cheaper offfers for > a Macbook air. Do all the web sites need to refer to the same URI to > identify the product "Macbook air" (provided by who? > A (goodrelations) apple Web site?) or "Macbook air" is just a literal > assigned to a property? In the second case how the linkining process > is performed? Just by using a simple string comparison? > In an ideal world, Apple as the manufacturer would / will publish the data for the make and model "Macbook Air" in its own domain name space, including all distinct features etc. Example <http://www.apple.com/products/macbook-air#makeAndModel> a gr:ProductOrServiceModel. Retailers could then announce offer for macbook-air computers by using gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder and using Apple's authoritative URI when linking to the make and model: foo:myBunchOfMacBooks a gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder; gr:hasMakeAndModel <http://www.apple.com/products/macbook-air#makeAndModel>. (Side remark: This would allow inferring product feature details from the model specification, as sketched in http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Ruleset_for_Product_Model_Properties). Now, what will happen (is already happening) in practice is that may people will define a make and model for the MacBook Air, simply because there either is no "authoritative" definition (e.g. by Apple) or they have no easy way of getting the respective URI (it may not be included in their current product database and they have no resource searching for those URIs). So BestBuy and Amazon and other will all define multiple gr:ProductOrServiceModel instances in their own name space and provide links only to their local model definition. The challenge for a GoodRelations commerce dataspace will then be to consolidate the multiple URIs describing the same make and model - entity consolidation as known from distributed databases. Fortunately, already a few simple heuristics will get you far, since you are operating on structured data, not on plain text. For example, you could compute string distance metrics for all pairs of gr:ProductOrServiceModel instances in the space for their rdfs:label literals. Even more powerful will be searching for matching gr:hasEAN_UCC-13 properties. If the EAN or UCC13 code of two gr:ProductOrServiceModel instances is nonempty and matches, you can be almost certain that they reflect the same model. Hope that clarifies the issue :-) By the way, you face the same problem of entity consolidation anywhere on the Semantic Web - dozens of foaf profiles reflecting the same human etc. Note that this is a strong argument for NATIVE RDFa / RDF meta-data, because all RDF derived from microformats or proprietary structures will lack authoritative URIs. Best Martin -- -------------------------------------------------------------- martin hepp e-business & web science research group universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen e-mail: mhepp at computer.org phone: +49-(0)89-6004-4217 fax: +49-(0)89-6004-4620 www: http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group) http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal) skype: mfhepp twitter: mfhepp Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data! ================================================================= Webcast: http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/ Recipe for Yahoo SearchMonkey: http://tr.im/rAbN Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: "Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology" http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp Talk at Overview article on Semantic Universe: http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe Project page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/ Resources for developers: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations Tutorial materials: CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey http://tr.im/grcec09