Re: How to encode a product family?

I would simply use schema:category with a string or enumerated value (you can use schema:category with schema:Brand or schema:QualitativeValue (or any other subtype of Thing) or schema:brand with a schema:Brand entity.

ProductFamily has a weak meaning and will likely not improve the quality of the resulting data, because people will use it in many different ways, so in the end, we will have a blurry intermediate type that does not provide any added value over existing mechanisms, like

- schema:category,
- schema:brand,
- schema:additionalType, and
- multi-typed entities.

If the backend database does not contain a product family relation, rather use schema:category with a text value and let the big search engines do the entity consolidation. After all, they have more data and processing power than a single site ;-)

As a general rule, we should not encourage sites to use unreliable heuristics to lift their data to heightened requirements in terms of data granularity or disambiguation. Unless the sites have respective high-quality data in their backends readily available (i.e. we just have to encourage them to *expose* better data), the result will be low-quality data and the big consumers of schema.org will have to discard such additional data anyway.

Martin

-----------------------------------
martin hepp  http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org          @mfhepp




> On 03 May 2016, at 17:57, Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "Could you not refer to the manufacturer's page for asserting  such a relationship?:"
> 
> Oh, one could definitely do so but the problem I keep running into on large scale e-commerce sites is that the product data they receive/have in 99% of the cases doesn't contain any 'product family' nor any 'manufacturer's page' information. Which is a serious issue for sites containing more than 100k products as on that scale it isn't feasible to manually find/add such information.
> 
> What happens in these cases is that such parties write algo's that compare products based on the information they do have ('name', 'brand' and some string information) to 'sort of' deduct what the product family is. But since the outcome of such algo's often contain a certain error rate it's nearly impossible to state these fall under the same product model. 
> 
> The end result more often than not is an approximated grouping these businesses internally call product families and which most of the time differ from the product manufacturers state are part of a product model line.
> 
> Something that makes me wonder for a long time already whether we should have ProductFamily type to accommodate this type of grouping.
> 
> 2016-05-03 17:37 GMT+02:00 Hans Polak <info@polak.es>:
> Hi Alexandre,
> 
> Could you play around with it here https://generator-1260.appspot.com/ProductModel ?
> 
> I'd love to get more feedback.
> 
> Cheers,
> Hans
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 3 May 2016 16:08:20 UTC