GoodRelations: Site Relaunch and Service Update

Dear all:

We just deployed the new GoodRelations Web site and a GoodRelations Service Update at

   http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Please refresh your caches and repositories.

The relaunch is a major step to a more developer-friendly environment. Here is a summary of the changes:

- Social Web functionality for each individual GoodRelations element - you can easily share and refer friends to each and every element directly
- Tight integration with popular developer forums, like Quora, StackOverflow, answers.semanticweb.com, so that questions related to parts of GoodRelations can be shared with relevant experts with ease
- Cross-references to external resources related to an element (e.g. a link to Wikipedia pages when a property value is from a standard code)
- Examples in Turtle, RDF/XML, RDFa, and SPARQL for each element (this is currently work in progress)
- New screen-design and Wiki

The Service Update 2011-04-01 also brings a few modifications to the vocabulary. They are implemented in a backwards-compatible fashion and approved by Yahoo and Google, so their parsers will tolerate the old and the new versions.

gr:ActualProductOrServiceInstance             --> gr:Individual
gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder  --> gr:SomeItems
gr:LocationOfSalesOrServiceProvisioning       --> gr:Location

For new data and applications, please use the new, shorter elements. Old data does not have to be updated, as long as the consuming client  or triplestore can handle owl:equivalentClass. If you touch your modeling patterns or queries, it would be better to move to the new identifiers now.

Also, we added a few new elements:

* Additional payment options: gr:JCB, gr:PaySwarm, and gr:GoogleCheckout
* gr:GTIN-8 property for GTIN-8 (EAN/UCC-8) codes
* gr:displayPosition (owl:AnnotationProperty) so that a preferred display position for elements and data can be represented
* gr:Brand class and gr:hasBrand property for relating gr:ProductOrService and gr:BusinessEntity nodes to a brand name or brand identity

For the full Changelog, see 

   http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Changelog/20110401

A huge thanks to my team members Andreas Radinger, Alex Stolz, Uwe Stoll, and László Török for their hard work on this!

Best wishes

Martin Hepp