Re: How to encode a product family?

I would advise Product -> brand over Product -> category, so that readers
understand that we are discussing brands/families rather than some external
category system.

Genres/categories are incredibly complex and difficult to use effectively.

- Vicki

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 1:55 PM, Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com>
wrote:

> foo:iphone5se_gray_64gb a schema:ProductModel, pto:Smartphone;
>>         schema:name "iPhone 5 SE Space-Grey, 64 GB";
>>         schema:category "Apple iPhone Family";
>
>
> Looks nice but there are a couple of practical issues I got with this.
>
> 1] *"pto:Smartphone"*
>
> Even though this sounds nice in theory in all the years I've been doing
> this I still have to encounter an employer/client that's willing to map
> 1000+ categories to external enumerations simply because they don't see the
> added value in comparison to the costs of setting this up and maintaining
> it (unless it's for advertisement feeds). In the end, if manufacturers/data
> companies don't provide to such data to e-commerce sites the costs of
> adding this type of data manually simply is too high for most.
>
> 2] *"schema:category "Apple iPhone Family";"*
>
> On many sites I've worked on things are categorized as: *mobile >
> smartphone > iphone > iphone 5 SE. *A type of categorization where each
> layer of categories is a product listing page. How do you imagine handling
> that, maybe something like this?
>
> <script type="application/ld+json">
> {
>   "@context": "http://schema.org",
>   "@type": "Product",
>   "name": "iPhone 5 SE Space-Grey, 64 GB",
>   "url": "http://www.example.com/product/iphone-5se-space-grey-64-gb",
>   "category":
>   {
>     "@type": "CollectionPage",
>     "name": "iPhone 5 SE",
>     "url": "http://www.example.com/mobile/smartphone/iphone/iphone5se",
>     "about":
>     {
>       "@id": "#Brand"
>     }
>   },
>   "brand":
>   {
>     "@type": "Brand",
>     "@id": "#Brand",
>     "name": "iPhone 5 SE"
>   }
> }
> </script>
>
> *"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 ;-)"*
>
>
> +1
>
> *"i.e. we just have to encourage them to *expose* better data"*
>
>
> Well, that's my aim here, not to add something new to the schema perse.
> However, I've read plenty questions about how to express product families,
> while running into these sorts of situations myself as well. Unfortunately
> there's little to find in regards to marking up product listing pages,
> categorization and product 'families'.
>
> Maybe we could do something about the unclarity by providing some
> schema.org examples that show how one could express the notions product
> listing pages, categorization and product 'families'?
>
> I have no problem spending some time on this but to do so will require a
> better notion of what is considered a best practice for this sort of
> situation.
>
> --
>
> Note: Adding a 'topicOf' property to schema.org/Tthing might help here as
> well as we then could express (and avoid the use of fragment identifiers):
>
> <script type="application/ld+json">
> {
>   "@context": "http://schema.org",
>   "@type": "Product",
>   "name": "iPhone 5 SE Space-Grey, 64 GB",
>   "url": "http://www.example.com/product/iphone-5se-space-grey-64-gb",
>   "category":
>   {
>     "@type": "Brand",
>     "name": "iPhone 5 SE",
>     "topicOf":
>     {
>       "@id": "http://www.example.com/mobile/smartphone/iphone/iphone5se"
>     }
>   }
> }
> </script>
>
>
> 2016-05-03 17:57 GMT+02:00 Jarno van Driel <jarnovandriel@gmail.com>:
>
>> *"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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>