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GoodRelations - The Web Vocabulary for E-Commerce

This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

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.

[goodrelations] Can gr:Location be used for virtual locations?

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




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