Re: ANN: The GoodRelations Annotator: How any business can get onto the Web of Data - today!

Hi Giovanni,

Giovanni Tummarello wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> this is brilliant,
>
Thanks.
> my concern however is that the semantic is dropped when you get to 
> what exactly you sell. I mean you do allow certain predefined 
> categories but then the description of what you actually sell is left 
> to the text.
>
> It would be cool to allow e.g. links to dbpedia for the kind of things 
> you sell. I am afraid as it is you get very very close to a great 
> enabling thing but might be stopping a step shorter? what do you think?
>
This is just a constraint of the tool, not of the GoodRelations 
ontology. The tool should be useable by any SME in teh world in five 
minutes. This prohibits complexity (I am not sure how many hotels owners 
in Canada know dbPedia at this point in time...).

In GoodRelations, you have at least three options for describing WHAT 
you are selling:

a) Use an existing, fully-fledged products or services ontology (e.g. 
eClassOWL). Many such ontologies are available or close to an official 
release.
eClassOWL allows a much more fine grained description of the item, e.g. 
by ranges on properties etc.
See

   http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/primer/

and
   
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/primer/#3.4_Step_2:_Products_and_Offerings

for details.

b) Turn an proprietary structure (e.g. a large merchant's catalog 
structure) into a proprietary ontology for products and services and 
describe your items by references to that structure.
This approach is (partly) described in

   
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/documentation/vocabulary-dev

The advantage is that you don't put a lot of burden on the publisher to 
lift his/her data. Alignments with other structures can then be 
established incrementally, elsewhere, and by someone else.

c) Describe the item lexically only.
Example:
default:SonyCellPhoneModel_s1234
      a gr:ProductOrServiceModel ;
      rdfs:comment "Sony cell phone model s1234, water-proof, 
shock-resistant"^^xsd:string ;
      rdfs:seeAlso <http://www.sony.com/cellphones/s1234/> ;

In this case, you formally know only that what is being sold is a 
ProductOrServiceModel (or gr:ActualProductOrService or 
gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder), and that it is described 
by a string that contains certain words.

But that may already be quite useful for queries - you can search for 
something that is a product and whose textual description contains the 
word "phone". And you have access to all commercial properties in a 
machine-readable way.

I assume that we can eventually get a really huge data cloud of product 
and offering data on the Web pretty soon.

Once that is done, we can start using all kinds of semantic technologies 
to establish links and alignments between the variants a), b), and c).

Recipes and more developer information is also available in the Wiki at

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Best
Martin
http://www.heppnetz.de
http://purl.org/goodrelations/


> Giovanni
>
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@unibw.de 
> <mailto:martin.hepp@unibw.de>> wrote:
>
>     Dear all:
>
>     We are proud to announce the release of the GoodRelations
>     Annotator, a form-based tool that will help any business in the
>     world to create a description of its offerings suitable for the
>     Web of Data,
>     and that in less than 5 minutes.
>
>     The tool is available at
>
>     http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
>     It creates a straightforward yet complete description of the key
>     aspects of a typical business using the GoodRelations vocabulary
>     and current Semantic Web standards.
>
>     The resulting RDF/XML file can be either directly published on the
>     company's Web site or used as a skeleton for developing a more
>     fine-grained description with price information etc.
>
>     The work on the tool has been funded by the Oesterreichische
>     Forschungsfoerderungsgesellschaft GmbH (FFG) and the Austrian
>     Bundesministerium fuer Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie (BMVIT)
>     under the myOntology project in the FIT-IT "Semantic Systems"
>     program (contract number 812515).
>
>     Please help spread the word.
>
>     Best wishes
>     Martin Hepp
>     http://www.heppnetz.de
>     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/
>
>     Tool:
>     http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/goodrelations-annotator/
>
>     GoodRelations Project:
>     http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/
>
>     Webcast (15 Minutes)
>     http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/
>
>