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.
Osma Suominen
osma.suominen at aalto.fi
Tue Nov 27 11:34:41 CET 2012
Hello, I'm developing a vocabulary/ontology for describing public services. The goal is to express things like: * this kindergarten at this location provides day care services for families living within this municipality; its opening hours are X, location Y and contact information Z * the cities A,B,C together offer this free help line that residents can call to get medical assistance; the service is actually provided by medical company X (paid for by the cities) * the city library in X provides library services at this location; on its website at URL Y, you can also borrow e-books as a self-service As you might guess, many parts of the ontology are heavily influenced by, and derived from, GoodRelations. It is possible to express most of the important things in this domain using GR constructs such as gr:Offering, gr:BusinessEntity and probably some form of gr:ProductOrService subclasses. There will also be extensions detailing the various relationships between organizations (e.g. who pays for what) and for accessibility information. What I'm struggling with is that some of the services are provided in non-physical service points/channels, i.e. on the web or by phone. In many cases, the "same" service is available through more than one channel. Opening hours are relevant for both physical locations and phone services, in rare cases even for websites. I'd like to use gr:availableAtOrFrom and gr:Location to express also these virtual service points and then (optionally) attach opening hours information to them using gr:hasOpeningHoursSpecification. But part the gr:Location description says "Locations are characterized by an address or geographical position and a set of opening hour specifications for various days of the week." In my public service case, the non-physical service points do not have a meaningful geographical address or position. Instead the "location" is a URL of a web site or a phone number. I can imagine similar use cases in the e-commerce domain that GR is aimed at, for example companies that sell downloads (magazine articles, music, creditworthiness reports...) on the web. So finally to my questions: 1. Do you think it would still be fine to use (a subclass of) gr:Location to model these? 2. If yes, could the description of gr:Location be amended to include also non-physical locations offering products and services? Thanks in advance, Osma -- Osma Suominen | Osma.Suominen at aalto.fi | +358 40 5255 882 Aalto University, Department of Media Technology, Semantic Computing Research Group Room 2541, Otaniementie 17, Espoo, Finland; P.O. Box 15500, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland