Re: GoodRelations for publishing data

Dear Cristiano,

Publishing the description of a product or product offering using terms from the GoodRelations or schema.org vocabulary and markup in RDFa or Microdata *may* result in enhanced search results (e.g. Google Rich Snippets) being displayed for your product, depending on the search keywords used.  

I don't think it would necessarily favour entering Sears or K-Mart - and I certainly can't speak on their behalf, but I suppose that if you are describing a specialised niche product, then it might be more 'visible' to the purchasing agents of such stores (who decide which products to stock and where to source them from) than it would be otherwise, if they are occasionally looking to broaden the range of products that they offer - but I don't think that it will directly favour the listing of the product in such sites - it may just be a small positive contributory factor.

However, adding semantic markup for the product description and specifications may also be a good idea to consider even for direct-to-consumer sales.  Increasingly, for some kinds of products, consumer behaviour is switching to buying online direct from the manufacturer, bypassing traditional retailers.

There are a few tools that you can use to get started with adding semantic markup for products, including the GoodRelations Rich Snippet generator tool [ http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/ ] and the Google Structured Data Markup Helper [ https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/ ]

If you are trying to describe the product's technical specifications in detail (e.g. the nutritional information for food products or the technical specifications of a digital camera or other consumer electronics product), you will probably find that you are using quantitative values consisting of a numerical value and a unit of measure.  

There are some very good tools such as http://rdfa.info/play and http://linter.structured-data.org/ that can help you to check that the graph of structured data for the product is as intended, that there aren't any dangling orphaned nodes or nodes that are misconnected.  Depending on the layout of the web page and the nesting of various <div> blocks or applying semantic markup in HTML <table> elements, there are sometimes things that can trip you up, so it's always a good idea to use tools like http://rdfa.info/play and http://linter.structured-data.org/ to check that the extracted RDF triples and visualise the graph structure.

I hope this helps!

- Mark Harrison




On 12 Feb 2014, at 12:53, Cristiano Longo <longo@dmi.unict.it> wrote:

> Dear Martin, I'm a sofware developer with some research skills in the field of knoweldge representation. I found a mail you sent on the semantic web mailing list (see cc) around two years ago about the pubblication by sears and kmart of their products using semantic web format. I wonder about the converse direction: do you know if publishing the description of a product as RDFa or RDF/XML may favour in entering into the sear or kmart (or some other e-commerce portal) in some way?
> 
> Thank you in advance.
> CL
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 February 2014 14:17:21 UTC