GoodRelations: URI of a REST or SOAP based fulfillment / PaymentMethod objects?

Dear all:

There has been the valuable suggestion to add lightweight support for 
attaching related REST or SOAP services URIs to the GoodRelations 
ontology (http://purl.org/goodrelations/). On one hand, the benefit of 
this is clear; one can easily link to invocable functionality from an 
offering, a price specification, or any other element. On the other hand 
it is also clear that we should not try to reinvent the wheel and 
replicate all the ongoing works on vocabularies for describing Web Services.

Prior to implementing such an extension, I kindly ask for feedback on 
the following proposal - thanks in advance for any comments. (Authors of 
other vocabularies may face similar requests.)

Background: GoodRelations has four key conceptual elements: a) 
BusinessEntity, b) Offering, c) ProductOrService, and d) Web Resource.

The first three ones are explicitly defined. As for Web Resource, we 
assume they are  instances of rdfs:Resource and use the rdfs:seeAlso 
property for linking the actual conceptual entities (business entities, 
offerings, product instances, etc.) to Web Resources that contain a 
human-readable description or similar. This is why there is no class 
“Web Resource” in the GoodRelations ontology.

Now, in my opinion, SOAP or REST Web Services are a proper 
specialization of rdfs:Resource.

Thus, we plan to simply define a new property

gr:relatedWebService rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:seeAlso

(There could be further specializations of this gr:relatedWebService 
property, based on functional or business-wise distinctions, but we have 
no plans to define those in the generic GoodRelations vocabulary.)

This property will allow attaching a related Web service to any 
conceptual entity (offering, price specification, business entity, 
etc.), without
duplicating current efforts of modeling Web Services descriptions. We 
would also be neutral to any such competing efforts.

At the same time, any existing or upcoming vocabulary for Web Services 
could be used in combination with GoodRelations, because the
respective association can be made via the Web Service Entity URI values 
associated with the gr:relatedWebService property
(Thanks to Kingsley Idehen from OpenLink Software for his thoughts on 
this!).

Are there any objections / concerns?

Best wishes

Martin


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



GoodRelations: A a lightweight yet sophisticated vocabulary Semantic 
Web-based e-commerce
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/