Hepp's ontology for E-Commerce: GoodRelations
Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp generated a lot of activity during recent years – all of it in the semantic arena. He spent quite some time at DERI Innsbrück (now STI) and has a strong background in economics, which enables him to bring a welcome perspective on the domain and the technology. Take a look at his more accessible article on the feasibility of ontology engineering: “Possible ontologies: how reality constrains the development of relevant ontologies”. Pieter co-edited a state-of-the-art ontology management book with him.
His latest activity is called “GoodRelations“, which he describes a “a real world ontology for Semantic-Web based E-Commerce”. It is his approach at realizing a piece of the Semantic Web puzzle and it looks like it will fit. The core of the ontology is focused at the relation between a product/service seller and buyer. Check out his website for more details: there is a lot of documentation, including presentations and video. He lists a number of use cases that GoodRelations can enable, ranging from basic (just publishing your opening hours and contact details) to advanced (publishing and consuming detailed product data).
A snippet of Collibra's GoodRelations
I attended his lecture at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, believed that this thing stood a good chance and tried out Martin’s annotator. This online gizmo took about 10 minutes of my time after which it spawed an RDF file describing Collibra’s activities (opening hours, contact details, payment and delivery methods and area of activity). The file is online at our website, ready for Semantic Web consumption to all that want to (and can) consume it. I had to follow a small recipe to get the file, install it, configure the web server and ping some Semantic Web indexes (like Sindice). Nothing went without problems, but a bit of perseverance will pull you through. Like my yoga teacher always reminds me: “what comes easy, goes easy”.
Next up – see who Martin can convince to consume this kind of data (think in the likes of Yahoo, Google and others). Another next up, take a look at some product data and see what Collibra’s Information Enabler can do with it in this context. Stay tuned.
Small update: it seems that Yahoo Searchmonkey already lists GoodRelations.
One Comment
Just found out that Best Buy is using GoodRelations to publish business information about all its stores!
http://jay.beweep.com/index.php/2009/06/05/best-buy-local-stores-goes-semantic-with-good-relations-ontology/
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[...] applications. One of those is the GoodRelations ontology by Martin Hepp (discussed by Stijn in a previous blog post). Although the entire Semantic Web movement has goals that go far beyond this kind of [...]
[...] One of those is the GoodRelations ontology by Martin Hepp (discussed by Stijn in a previous blog post). Although the entire Semantic Web movement has goals that go far beyond this kind of [...]