Linked Data in E-Commerce –
The GoodRelations Ontology
ISKO UK Conference on Linked Data
September 14, 2020, London, UK
Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp
Professur für Allgemeine BWL, insbesondere E-Business

Matchmaking in Market Economies
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Macroeconomic Impact
Transaction Costs:
> 50 % of the
US GDP (1970)
John Joseph Wallis and Douglas C. North:
Measuring the Transaction Sector in the
American Economy, 1870 – 1970
(1986)
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Key Driver of Search Costs:
Specificity
How much you loose when you can‘t
use a good for what it was designed.

Growth in Specificity
1920: 5168 Types of Goods
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5

Examples
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Examples
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Examples
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Specificity Increases the
Search Space
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WWW:
Dramatic Reduction of Search Effort
1993 2010
Lower search costs per search than
ever before in history.
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But ….

The WWW: A Giant Data Shredder
Source: Recipient:
Structured Data Unstructured Text
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What is Linked Data Linked
loves
Susi Martin
1 2 3 4
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What is Special About E-Commerce Data?
1
2 RDBMS
3
4 $$$
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GoodRelations: A Global Schema for
Commerce Data on the Web
Extraction
Arbitrary Query and Reuse
Manufacturers
Retailers
Payment
Delivery
Product Model Warranty
Master Data Shop Spare Parts &
Offerings Auctions Consumables
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On the Shoulders of Giants
A Unified View of Commerce Data
on the Web
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GoodRelations Principle: Small Data
Packets Inside Your Page
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Albert Einstein on Schema Design
"Make everything as simple as possible, but
not simpler.“
Albert Einstein
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Data, Standards, Ontologies
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Subtle Distinctions Foster Data Reuse
• Product Offer
– „You can buy or lease my house“
• Store Business entity
– „How many Tesco stores are in London?“
• Product Product Model
– „How many digital cameras by Canon are
listed on eBay“?
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Basic Structure of Offers
Object or
Agent 1 Promise
Happening
Compensation Transfer of
Rights
Agent 2
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Valuable Types of Links:
Product - Product Model
Photo credits: Flickr.com, available
under CC BY 2.0 by bsabarnowl
Ford T
Data- gr:hasMakeAndModel
sheet
Often via strong, non-URI identifiers like EAN/UPC
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Valuable Types of Links:
Offer – Store(s)
XYZ
gr:availableAtOrFrom
for $
99
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Valuable Types of Links:
Company – Store(s)
gr:hasPOS
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Impact and Success
• One of the few vocabularies implemented
by major businesses out of their own
budget.
• BestBuy, O’Reilly, Overstock.com,…
• Ca. 16 % of all triples as of now
• Supported by Yahoo
• Bing, Google may join
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Yahoo Enhanced by SearchMonkey
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Developer Resources, Data, Tools
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
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Thank you!
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
Prof. Dr. Martin Hepp
Chair of General Management and E-Business
Universitaet der Bundeswehr Muenchen
Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39
D-85579 Neubiberg, Germany
Phone: +49 89 6004-4217
Fax: +49 89 6004-4620
http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/
http://purl.org/goodrelations/
mhepp@computer.org
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Both Sides Can Help Build a Bridge
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Why is GoodRelations not part of the
Linked Open Data cloud diagram?
Is GoodRelations data linked data
after all?

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Ontology Economics
Hepp, Martin: Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the
Development of Relevant Ontologies, in: IEEE Internet Computing,
31
Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 90-96, Jan-Feb 2007

GoodRelations Design Principles
• Keep simple things Lightweight Heavyweight
simple and make Web of Data Web of Data
complex things
possible LOD OWL DL
• Cater for LOD and OWL RDF + a little bit
DL worlds
• Academically sound
• Industry-strength
engineering
• Practically relevant
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Incredible Success
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GoodRelations #2 of all Web Ontologies
…and this does not yet include the > 10 Mio. offers
from Amazon and eBay!
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GoodRelations #2 of all Web Ontologies
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