ANN: BauDataWeb: The European Building and Construction Materials Dataset for the Semantic Web

Dear all:

I am glad to announce the official release of BauDataWeb, the European 
building and construction materials database for the Semantic Web:

URI: http://semantic.eurobau.com/

With this project, we expose a major dataset reflecting the European 
building and construction materials market on the basis of the 
GoodRelations Web Vocabulary for E-Commerce. This allows for the 
fine-grained search for products, suppliers, and warehouses for any 
building-related sourcing need.

BauDataWeb is one of the densest and richest public datasets for a 
well-defined vertical business sector that is available on the Semantic 
Web. It covers a major share of the European market for construction and 
building materials.

Key distinctions from other datasets are:

1. The market for building materials shows a very high item specificity, 
which makes it very interesting for new types of search.

2. Transportation costs for building materials are usually very 
significant, which makes the distance from the warehouse to the point of 
consumption a critical dimension of search.

3. A large part of the items includes a rich, machine-readable 
description of product features using the FreeClassOWL ontology.

We expect that the data can be very well combined with other related 
datasets on the Web of Linked Data, e.g.

   * dbPedia information about population or transportation infrastructure,
   * governmental information, or
   * real estate offers.

Features
========

    * Over 60 million triples of real business data with a high domain 
density
    * Fully GoodRelations-compliant
    * Fully W3C-compliant
    * Geo data for warehouse locations
    * FreeClassOWL product classes and properties for a majority of the 
products

Components
==========
1. Dataset: The full data is available in RDF. The data consists of ca. 
1.5 million individual RDF/XML files plus a few large data dumps in 
N-Triples syntax that simplify the crawling of all data at once. For 
fetching the dataset, please use the sitemap at 
http://semantic.eurobau.com/sitemap.xml.

2. FreeClassOWL: A GoodRelations-compliant ontology for describing 
construction and building materials and services
    * HTML: http://www.freeclass.eu/freeclass_v1.html
    * OWL in RDF/XML: http://www.freeclass.eu/freeclass_v1.owl

3. The Eurobau Utility Ontology, which defines a few extensions to 
GoodRelations for the particular vertical domain
    * OWL in RDF/XML: http://semantic.eurobau.com/eurobau-utility.owl 
(no other representation available at the moment)

4. A (simple) demo application that demonstrates queries combining 
product features and warehouse distance
    * http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/freeclass-search/

SPARQL Access
=============
Currently, the data is available for SPARQL queries via the OpenLink 
Software Virtuoso repositories at
     * http://lod.openlinksw.com/sparql and
     * http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/sparql

Statistics
==========
    * 81 Manufacturers / Brands
    * 19 Resellers
    * 183 Warehouse locations in Austria
    * 56.360 Product types (including variants)
    * 1.783.798 Offerings
    * 95 % of the product models include rich FreeClassOWL descriptions, 
e.g. class membership and properties

Acknowledgments
===============
BauDataWeb is a joint project by inndata Datentechnik GmbH and the 
E-Business & Web Science Research Group at Universität der Bundeswehr 
München. The data conversion and implementation was carried out by 
Andreas Radinger and Martin Hepp at the E-Business & Web Science 
Research Group at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany. The 
underlying relational database has been designed by Otto Handle and is 
being maintained and operated by inndata Datentechnik GmbH.
The work on BauDataWeb was partially funded by the Austrian FFG under 
the project grant "icontent.document" (grant no. 819773). Thanks go also 
to Kingsley Idehen from OpenLink Software for hosting the data.


Best wishes

Martin Hepp

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

e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.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 GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================

Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Webcasts:
Overview - http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
How-to   - http://vimeo.com/7583816

Recipe for Yahoo SearchMonkey:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_and_Yahoo_SearchMonkey

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009:
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-ontology-1535287

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-web-based-e-commerce-webmasters-get-ready.html

Tutorial materials:
ISWC 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in Brief: A Hands-on 
Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/Web_of_Data_for_E-Commerce_Tutorial_ISWC2009

Received on Monday, 12 July 2010 11:38:59 UTC