Re: Recipe for Shops: Showing up in Yahoo and in the Web of Data in One Turn

Hi Benjamin, all:
First, thanks for the feedback!
Second - I just completely updated the page - among other things, I 
added datatypes to xsd:string literals, reduced the complexity of the 
linking between visible content and meta-data (e.g. opening hours specs).

All examples and content at

   * 
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_and_Yahoo_SearchMonkey

and the sample files at

   * http://www.heppnetz.de/searchmonkey/company.html and
   * http://www.heppnetz.de/searchmonkey/product.html

validate now with Yahoo! tools, W3C Markup Validation tools, and the RDF 
Validator (after extraction via pyRDFa).
As to your points:


Benjamin Nowack wrote:
> Interesting. I guess this is another argument/example pro Hugh 
> Glaser's idea of simply conflating resource IDs for the sake of
> "deployability". The example types <#business> as Vcard, Business
> and also as BusinessEntity which would usually be considered wrong
> RDF, but, as argued before, is more intuitive for HTML authors, 
> especially if they found their way to the SemWeb through pragmatic
> solutions like microformats. We should really give this contextual
> semantics idea another thought.
>   
Actually, I disagree completely.

Conflating multiple resources under one URI is deadly, because it 
compromises the later reuse and recombination of data.

In my example, commerce:Business and gr:BusinessEntity are practically 
equivalent classes, so this pair is rather a schema alignment than using 
one URI for distinct things.

Making the business entity also an instance of vcard:VCard is only 
because the upcoming vCard2006 cleansing is not yet available, in which 
the domain of vcard:adr is likely to be changed from vcard:VCard to a 
wider set of classes, because most locations, persons, or legal entities 
can have addresses - not only via a vCard node. (**You** do have an 
address, not your business card.).

So again, this was only a work-around (initially introduced by Yahoo) to 
make the whole thing fly now, not later. And the ontological nature of 
vcard:VCard is now widely understood in a pretty broad sense, subsuming 
commerce:Business and gr:BusinessEntity - maybe up to proton:Object.

> (I fear you'll lose a significant chunk of the possible audience at 
> "change your DTD" and "add ... to the head tag", these sort of tweaks
> are not necessarily easy to do in CMS-based or commercial publishing 
> tools unless there is a dedicated plugin that is not erased with the 
> next site upgrade. For root/head-level changes, the content *authors*
> have to coordinate their tasks with the tech/site *admins*, which 
> leads to non-trivial friction loss and hence lowers the deployment 
> probability.)
>   
Well, there is nothing I can do about that, it is simply an important 
technical requirement.
If you omit it, the content will no longer validate and data extraction 
and reuse turns from a predictable computational operation into 
probabilistic guesswork: it may work, or it may not.
Then you are back in the realm of pure NLP. (almost ;-).

Note that Drupal now has a mode that activates automatic DOCTYPE 
replacement for serving RDFa. More info at:

http://drupal.org/node/391372

I think that at least such basic RDFa support will soon be a mandatory 
feature for any CMS on the market.
> A general suggestion would be to keep the added markup at a minimum,
> until GR is more deployed and people start asking for more on their
> own. Remove as many non-mandatory descriptions as possible, at least
> if the recipes are targeted at newcomers. Stuff like
> "ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder" or
> "LocationOfSalesOrServiceProvisioning" is probably not very 
> attractive to web dev people who are only just getting acquainted 
> with structured markup and want to check out if/how it works.
>   
Well - some of the element names in GoodRelations may be a bit long, but 
it was initially important to convey the precise meaning. Some could be 
shortened, but at this stage of quick adoption, I think a few characters 
more or less are not worth risking additional incompatibilities between 
evolving applications and data.
Also note that a typical shop etc. may have just a few HTML templates 
for e.g. the company and the product detail pages. Ten lines of 
additional markup may be worth it if the actual content is generated 
automatically from those templates.
> I *personally* think that RDF-in-HTML snippets are most convincing 
> when the amount of additional RDF markup does not outweigh the 
> human-oriented content. 
IMO, there is dangerous tendency in part of current Web of Data 
research: After the frustration about the complexity (and limited 
impact) of logic-centric work, many researchers now want to keep things 
deadly simple. However, If you want really powerful meta-data, things 
will be more complex than adding "dc:title", I am afraid. It is a 
problem of entropy: Either you put in energy to introduce and maintain 
structure in your universe, or you need energy to manage your chaos.

;-)

> Otherwise it becomes hard to track the 
> initial meaning of the page and examples become less illustrative.
> Maybe drop some of the @typeofs which repeat the @rel values (e.g. 
> as in
>    <div rel="gr:hasOpeningHoursSpecification">
>       <div typeof="gr:OpeningHoursSpecification">
> ), 
Maybe I did not get it, but I do not see a way how you can drop any of 
those without compromising the data? The typeofs are important for 
typing the nodes and the rels are important for typing the relationships.
> or cheat visually by picking some shorter, less Cyc/AI-like 
> predicate names, perhaps? 
>   
As said - there may be some cleansing for element IDs in the future, but 
all current GoodRelations updates will not invalidate any pre-existing 
data or applications.

It is not about changing a few lines in an ongoing PhD project ;-). It 
would be about changing a running system.

Note that in the LOD cloud, there are now already 1 Million instances of 
gr:ProductOrServiceModel, some 45 k instances of gr:BusinessEntity, both 
not yet including the vast amount of data from the new RDF Book Mashup at

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/bookmashup/

that exposes a large deal of book offers on the Web as GoodRelations data.
> Just some thoughts,
> Benji
>   

Again, thanks for the feedback!

Best

Martin

> --
> Benjamin Nowack
> http://bnode.org/
> http://semsol.com/
>
> On 21.07.2009 19:42:00, Martin Hepp (UniBW) wrote:
>   
>> Dear all:
>>
>> I just completed a recipe meant for larger audiences (Web developers,
>> SEO companies) on how a business can enrich its pages using
>> RDFa+GoodRelations so that the data
>> - shows up in Yahoo AND
>> - it at the same time useful for comprehensive RDF applications.
>>
>> The recipe is at
>>
>> http://tr.im/rAbN
>>
>> It tries to combine pure recipes from the RDF world with the "Web
>> developer's" how-tos provided by Yahoo.
>>
>> Any feedback is very welcome.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> Martin Hepp
>>
>>     
>   

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

e-mail:  mhepp@computer.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 the GoodRelations vocabulary for E-Commerce on the Web of Data!
========================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: 
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp

Tool for registering your business:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe

Project page and resources for developers:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Tutorial materials:
Tutorial at ESWC 2009: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in One Day: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_Tutorial_ESWC2009