This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

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