GoodRelations is a standardized vocabulary for product, price, and company data that can (1) be embedded into existing static and dynamic Web pages and that (2) can be processed by other computers. This increases the visibility of your products and services in the latest generation of search engines, recommender systems, and other novel applications.
Martin Hepp (UniBW)
martin.hepp at ebusiness-unibw.org
Tue Mar 30 08:58:32 CEST 2010
Dear all: I have recently been asked to explain the advantages of GoodRelations over Microformats like hProduct. In a nutshell, it would be a gross misunderstanding to assume that hProduct and GoodRelations had the same effect or would be otherwise interchangeable. This is for the following reasons: 1. SEO and Other Effects ======================== With GoodRelations, you get FIVE effects from your mark-up a) Improved rendering in Yahoo search results --> See [1] b) Price info in Google search results --> See [2] c) Usually higher ranking in Google due to a higher data specificity (entropy) --> See [3] and [4] d) Visibility of your offers for all upcoming RDF / Linked Data value-added applications --> See [5] e) Visibility in Mobeedo and other mobile applications With hProduct, you will at max get the two effects a) and b). So with GoodRelations, you have one technique to harvest all effects and feed all potential server- and client-side applications. 2. Granularity and Data Reuse ============================= GoodRelations has a much cleaner data model and thus allows combining product model master data ("manufacturers' datasheets") with individual offers. Thus, manufacturers can use GoodRelations to help all retailers and other partners in the value chain to communicate their individual value proposition to the final consumers. hProduct just allows mark-up for one stage of the value chain with no potential value-added by deep interlinking across stages. Also, GoodRelations supports a wide range of granularity, i.e., you can preserve as much data semantics and data structure as you have at the origin. hProduct just allows one level of granularity. Lastly, GoodRelations allows but does not require combining the visual content of commerce sites and their meta-data. Microformats force you to model data along the organization of markup for the visual content, which can create complicated HTML content. 3. Popularity ============= By the end of 2010 or sooner, there will be more than 1 billion triples (RDF meta-data statements) for GoodRelations on the Web. Note that by OpenLink Software's "sponger" middleware technology, you can - as of now - access the APIs of Amazon, eBay, Zillow, ... as if they were exposing GoodRelations natively. This additional data is not yet included in the counting above. As always: Recipes for using GoodRelations in your pages are freely available in the growing GoodRelations Cookbook at http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#CookBook:_GoodRelations_Recipes_and_Examples I hope this helps. Best wishes Martin Hepp [1] http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations_and_Yahoo_SearchMonkey [2] http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsInGoogle [3] http://priyankmohan.blogspot.com/2009/12/online-retail-how-best-buy-is-using.html [4] http://www.solutions-answers-results.com.au/index.php/Ways-to-Improve-Your-Website/How-To-Get-Ranked-Without-Resorting-to-Outdated-SEO-Tactics.html (short URI: http://bit.ly/7atMfP) [5] http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#Consuming_GoodRelations_Data