ANN: GoodRelations - The Web Ontology for E-Commerce

Dear all:

We are proud to announce the official release of the GoodRelations
ontology, a comprehensive effort for making e-commerce on the Semantic
Web a reality.

GoodRelations is a lightweight yet sophisticated vocabulary for
describing the details of offers made on the Web. It empowers
manufacturers and shop operators to express the exact meaning of their
offers in a machine-readable way. This allows search engines to support
more precise search, and partners in the value chain to automate their
content integration tasks.

1. Project page
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
2. Ontology
http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1
3. Specification (via client-side rendering)
http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1
3. User's Guide
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/primer/

GoodRelations complements the eClassOWL ontology, which is the first
non-toy ontology for products and services. Since the initial release of
eClassOWL at ESWC 2005, that ontology has gained remarkable attention.
The latest version 5.1.4 provides more than 30,000 product classes and
more than 5,000 attributes for describing product features.

The relationship between these two ontologies is straightforward:
- eClassOWL provides classes, attributes, and values for describing what
a product or service is.
- GoodRelations provides everything needed for describing the
relationship between a business entity and a product or service, i.e.,
the actual offer and its details. That’s also the origin of the name –
it’s an ontology for the relations between goods and business entities.

While eClassOWL is the largest ontology for products and services, one
can use any other products or services ontology in combination with
GoodRelations. Only a few guidelines must be met.
For example, the Austrian ebSemantics initiative is close to release
several products and services ontologies for particular domains (events,
tickets, accommodation, etc.) that will be GoodRelations-compliant.

The main features of GoodRelations are as follows:
- Based on currently available Semantic Web standards, tools, and
infrastructure (“ready to run as of today”)
- Minimal requirements on reasoner support – any RDF-S-style reasoner,
OWL DLP, DL, or ter-Horst reasoner will work
- Support for all common business functions, like sell, lease, dispose,
repair, etc.
- Suits both for explicit instances, product models, and anonymous instances
- Supports different prices for different types of customers or quantities
- Supports product bundles in combination with all kinds of units of
measurements (“2 kg butter plus 2 cell phones for € 99” would be no problem)
- Supports price specifications both as single values or ranges
- Supports intervals and units of measurements for product features
- Compatible with eClassOWL and other ontologies
- Supports ISO 4217 currencies
- Supports defining eligible regions
- Supports common delivery and shipping methods
- Supports accepted payment methods
- Offerings can be constrained to certain eligible business entities
(e.g. resellers only)
- Supports warranty promises, i.e., the duration and scope
- Supports charges for certain payment or delivery options; the latter
also individually per region
- Compatible with international standards: ISO 3166, ISO 4217,
UN/CEFACT, eCl@ss, etc.

GoodRelations is the result of about five years of work in progress,
carried out at multiple institutions. The ontology is released under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Any feedback is very much appreciated! Also, if you need support in
adopting GoodRelations to your applications or data, please contact us.
We are already working with several organizations on making
GoodRelations part of their technology.

Best wishes

Martin Hepp
-------------------------------------------------------
e-business and web science research group
bundeswehr university munich
e-mail mhepp@computer.org
skype  mfhepp
web    http://www.heppnetz.de