This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

Dear all,

I am frequently asked whether GoodRelations provides classes and 
properties for describing the product or services included in an offer etc.
There seems to be a bit of confusion. GoodRelations provides two things:

1. A carefully designed set of classes, properties, and individuals for 
describing the offer and demand relationships between a business entity 
and a product.

2. A top-level ontology for specific products and services ontologies 
for describing functional aspects of products and services included in 
offers for sale, lease, repair, etc., i.e.
- gr:ProductOrService as a superclass and
- gr:quantitatativeProductOrServiceProperty, gr: 
qualitativeProductOrServiceProperty, gr:datatypeProductOrServiceProperty 
as superproperties for product features, and
- a bit more.

In "minimal" mode, you can use just part 1 of GoodRelations; it still 
buys you a lot, because you can combine "semantic" search with  fulltext 
search on a much smaller subset

See here: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsQueries (draft)

Compare a Google search for "camcorder" with a faceted search for all 
GoodRelations offers (gr:Offering) that include at least one
gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder, to which an rdfs:label or 
rdfs:comment is attached that contains the string "camcorder". You will

- search a much, much smaller text corpus (maybe 80 chars instead of 
Terabytes of text)
- narrow your search to English content using the RDF language tag (and 
expand it to other languages using Wikipedia etc.)

Detailed properties for describing the object or service (a camcorder, a 
car, an apartment,...) are being provided by GoodRelations-compliant 
ontologies for individual vertical industries, like eClassOWL, 
freeClass, Consumer Electronics Ontology (CEO), etc.

See here:

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#Compatible_Vocabularies_for_Products_and_Services

Such can be provided and are being prepared by many interest groups in 
relevant markets.

Also, you can use dbPedia URIs and/or turn proprietary catalog 
hierarchies into GoodRelations-compliant ontologies for describing the 
product in more granularity.

There will be recipes for those two alternatives at

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsComprehensiveDBpedia

and

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsComprehensiveCatalogGroups

The only important thing is that everybody uses the minimal top-level 
ontology part for product types and product features, as described here:

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#Creating_New_Vocabularies_for_Products_and_Services


Ideally, there will be one or just a few dominating ontologies for 
product types, at least in a given domain. But you should expect a few 
hundred in reality, and real business matchmaking on the Web of Linked 
Data will require
- a sophisticated,
- iterative (find out how your types of interest are described - popular 
properties etc.), and
- hybrid (combine structural/semantic and text/HLT/Regex) search 
strategy - for a sketch, see

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsQueries

Any shop will increase its visibility on the Giant Graph of Commerce 
Data if he/she

- adds more granularity and
- chooses popular ontologies for the given vertical industry instead of 
just publishing a proprietary vocabulary, even if that was GoodRelations 
compatible.


This will be the real challenge for future Search Engine Optimization 
using GoodRelations and RDFa. And there will be a trade-off decision 
between the effort and the impact, depending on the quality of the 
source data.

Many shops do currently just have a textual description of their 
products in their databases. We cannot force them to lift all that to a 
fully structured representation in one huge step, because they simply 
can't do that. But they can gradually add more detail.

Also, I have high hopes in OpenCalais and other NLT/HLT products for 
being able to lift minimal GoodRelations data to a more granular.

Again: GoodRelations supports a wide range of granularity - it really 
depends on the technical ability of the owner of the data to provide 
details.


Best wishes

Martin Hepp



-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  hepp at ebusiness-unibw.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!
=================================================================

Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Webcasts:
Overview - http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
How-to   - http://vimeo.com/7583816

Recipe for Yahoo SearchMonkey:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_and_Yahoo_SearchMonkey

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: 
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-ontology-1535287

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-web-based-e-commerce-webmasters-get-ready.html

Tutorial materials:
ISWC 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in Brief: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey 
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/Web_of_Data_for_E-Commerce_Tutorial_ISWC2009