Loadingdata | Daniel Bos

This is a more tech­ni­cal follow-up post on “The Seman­tic Web is going main­stream”. As a gen­eral intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject and an expla­na­tion of why this is impor­tant and what it could mean for the future I rec­om­mend first read­ing that article.

Good Rela­tions

The GoodRela­tions vocab­u­lary sup­ports three main con­cepts: a Busi­nessEn­tity, a Pro­duc­tOrSer­vice and an Offer­ing. Although Google cur­rently only sup­ports the lat­ter two, it is expected that, in time, the entire vocab­u­lary will be sup­ported. There­fore I would rec­om­mend to not just fol­low the cur­rent rec­om­men­da­tion, but to fol­low the offi­cial stan­dard. Although the main con­cepts are quite self-descriptive, I will explain them in a lit­tle more detail.

Busi­ness Entity

A Busi­nessEn­tity is used to describe a com­pany offer­ing a cer­tain ser­vice or prod­uct, or to describe the man­u­fac­turer of a prod­uct. Besides infor­ma­tion like the com­pany name and clas­si­fi­ca­tion, it is also pos­si­ble to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about store-locations and open­ing hours.

It is pos­si­ble, but not nec­es­sary to include this infor­ma­tion on every page. RDFa pro­vides ways to link to this infor­ma­tion on a sep­a­rate page. E.g. when the man­u­fac­turer of a prod­uct pro­vides it’s infor­ma­tion on it’s own web­site, it is rec­om­mended to use a link with the “has­Man­u­fac­turer” prop­erty from the prod­uct page.

Prod­uct Or Service

A Pro­duc­tOrSer­vice is used to describe the specifics of a cer­tain prod­uct or ser­vice, such as name, descrip­tion, cat­e­gory, color, weight, dimen­sions, stock-number, bar­code, etc. In addi­tion it is pos­si­ble to add links to sim­i­lar prod­ucts and related prod­ucts (such as spare parts)

By using links to indi­cate sim­i­lar or related prod­ucts it is entirely pos­si­ble to point to prod­ucts on other web­sites. E.g. if a com­pany sells pro­tec­tive sleeves for a cer­tain phone model, it might point to this model on the web­site of the phone man­u­fac­turer. In this way, when a user searches for pro­tec­tive sleeves for this model, the company’s prod­uct will show up.

Offer­ing

An Offer­ing describes the specifics of a cer­tain prod­uct offer­ing. This includes con­di­tion, inven­tory level, price (pos­si­bly in sev­eral cur­ren­cies), pay­ment meth­ods, deliv­ery meth­ods, stores or out­lets pro­vid­ing this offer­ing etc.

Again it is not nec­es­sary to include basic infor­ma­tion, such as pay­ment and deliv­ery meth­ods, on every page. A link with the cor­rect prop­erty suffices.

RDFa

To add the infor­ma­tion for the GoodRela­tions vocab­u­lary to a web page, the W3C stan­dard RDFa spec­i­fi­ca­tion is used. By using an indus­try stan­dard the infor­ma­tion can not only be under­stood by Google, but by every­one using one of the many tools and libraries available.

RDFa pro­vides the con­tent provider with a way to indi­cate the mean­ing of a piece of text or a link. The mean­ing is indi­cated by choos­ing the right word from one of the many con­trolled vocab­u­lar­ies. These vocab­u­lar­ies are like dic­tio­nar­ies on a cer­tain (usu­ally very small) topic. This way, once a con­sumer, like Google, has added logic to their sys­tem to under­stand this vocab­u­lary, it can “under­stand” every page using it.

For an excel­lent expla­na­tion of RDFa I sug­gest look­ing through this presentation:

Imple­ment­ing GoodRelations

The fol­low­ing code shows an exam­ple imple­men­ta­tion of the GoodRela­tions vocab­u­lary in a prod­uct offer­ing page, and is based on the exam­ple pro­vided by the mak­ers of the GoodRela­tions vocabulary:

In this exam­ple a prod­uct offer­ing is pro­vided, with name, descrip­tion, stock and price infor­ma­tion. Addi­tion­ally, it’s linked to the Busi­nessEn­tity sell­ing it and to the prod­uct this is an acces­sory for.

In a sim­i­lar way a man­u­fac­turer can pro­vide infor­ma­tion about his prod­ucts, which can be linked by busi­nesses sell­ing these prod­ucts.

Posted from Bei­jing, Bei­jing, China.

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This is a more tech­ni­cal follow-up post on “The Seman­tic Web is going main­stream”. As a gen­eral intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject and an expla­na­tion of why this is impor­tant and what it...