GoodRelations FAQ
From Public Wiki of the E-Business and Web Science Research Group
This page will contain Frequently Asked Questions regarding the GoodRelations Ontology for Semantic Web-based E-Commerce.
How stable is GoodRelations V1?
It's so stable that you can start developing applications that rely on respective data or produce such. The names, IDs, and the base URI http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1# are stable and meant to be persistent.
We may add a few more elements to the ontology as needed, but never in a way that old data will be invalidated.
What is the difference between GoodRelations and eClassOWL?
The relationship between these two ontologies is straightforward
- eClassOWL provides classes, attributes, and values for describing what a product or service is.
- GoodRelations provides everything needed for describing the relationship between a business entity and a product or service, i.e., the actual offer and its details. That’s also the origin of the name – it’s an ontology for therelations between goods and business entities.
While eClassOWL is the largest ontology for products and services, one can use any other products or services ontology in combination with GoodRelations. Only a few guidelines must be met.
For example, the Austrian ebSemantics initiative
If there are multiple ontologies for products and services types, how does GoodRelations provide interoperability between those?
It is unavoidable that there will be multiple ontologies for products and services types, e.g. such based on different classification schemas for products like UNSPSC or eClass. Creating and maintaining a complete and correct mapping between any pair of such ontologies is a large, on-going research challenge. GoodRelations itself does not solve this problem, but one can use state-of-the-art tools and languages for ontology alignments, in particular for finding and expressing semantic relations between product classes.
For search engines and shopping bots based on GoodRelations, we recommend that their developers develop their own mappings for at least the most popular ontologies. In fact, we expect such mappings to be a core source of competitive advantage for respective applications.
In a nutshell, we are convinced it is more important to provide ontologies that map directly to existing data structures instead of waiting for a single, perfect ontology or to wait for a perfect mapping, because this allows users to publish their existing data quickly. The mapping problem will be solved incrementally, and for individual business areas then.
See also the following lightning talk at ISWC 2008:
In and Out of Popular Structures: A Hidden Bottleneck for Ontology Adoption</u
Description: In order to be adopted by broad audiences, Web ontologies must not make more subtle conceptual distinctions than popular database schemes support; otherwise, populating the knowledge base is unfeasible for potential publishers of data. On the other hand, our structures must be subtle enough to allow rule-based import of Web data into common target structure.
