Modeling of Services in GoodRelations / WasRe: e-triples

Dear Danny:
Apologies for the delay ;-)
> Looking again at the vocab, the only significant part I'd do
> differently is ProductOrService (and similarly structured related
> classes). While in the context of selling stuff this combination fits
> well, there are big differences nearby, e.g. physical characteristics,
> means of delivery.
>
>   
You are right, gr:ProductsAndServices and its subclasses combine objects 
of two different kinds - basically,
- objects - "things that can be claimed to exist" (Proton)
- happings

Products are basically all objects on which property rights can be 
obtained and transferred, while Services are basically happenings that 
take place in the favor of someone and.

So the natural modeling would be a class gr:Product and a class gr:Service.

GoodRelations uses gr:ProductOrService, which is union of those two 
classes, because with many important data sources, it is difficult to 
distinguish the products from the services automatically and reliably. 
Remember, we often have shop systems with several 100k items, and very 
often a few percent of the entries are services.

It is basically a trade-off decision between the ease of populating the 
ontology vs. maximizing the reuse of the data.

See also

http://www.heppnetz.de/files/iswc-lightning-talk-hepp3.png

Another reason is that from the commercial perspective, there are many 
properties that are to be attached to both products and services, so we 
need the superclass anyway.

I expect now a lot of counterarguments from people who worked on 
fine-grained modeling of services ;-) Before anybody sends flames, 
please note that GoodRelations aims at services only insofar as 
"commodity services", like hairdressing, waste disposal, cleaning, etc. 
is concerned.
 
Best
Martin

PS: See recent stats on GoodRelations adoption at 
http://pingthesemanticweb.com/stats/types.php


-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  mhepp@computer.org
phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
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skype:   mfhepp 
twitter: mfhepp

Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================

Webcast:
http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/webcast/

Recipe for Yahoo SearcMonkey:
http://tr.im/rAbN

Talk at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009: 
"Semantic Web-based E-Commerce: The GoodRelations Ontology"
http://tinyurl.com/semtech-hepp

Overview article on Semantic Universe:
http://tinyurl.com/goodrelations-universe

Project page:
http://purl.org/goodrelations/

Resources for developers:
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Tutorial materials:
CEC'09 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce: A Hands-on Introduction to the GoodRelations Ontology, RDFa, and Yahoo! SearchMonkey 
http://tr.im/grcec09