3kbo

Tried out the newly released GoodRelations Annotator to create a Semantic Web description of a business.

The GoodRelations Annotator is an online form-based tool that creates an RDF/XML file “semanticweb.rdf” containing a description of the key aspects of the business. The description is based on concepts defined in the GoodRelations OWL ontology. In particular the description contains a BusinessEntity representing the business and one or more Offerings. Each Offering describes the intent to provide a Business Function for a certain Product or Service to a specified target audience.

The generated RDF/XML file can be either be published directly on the company’s Web site or used as a skeleton for developing a more fine-grained description.

The link Publishing GoodRelations Data on the Web provides guidelines on publishing to the web.

In my case I created a description for my embryonic business 3kbo.

I’m interested in linking the generated semanticweb.rdf to other things, in particular linking the BusinessEntity with people and with other BusinessEntitys.

Initially I added the URI of my foaf file to the BusinessEntity instance using rdfs:seeAlso, but after reading the definition of BusinessEntity i.e. that it represents the legal agent making a particular offering and
can be a legal body or a person, I changed it to owl:sameAs.

E.g.

<gr:BusinessEntity rdf:ID=”BusinessEntity”>
…
<owl:sameAs
rdf:resource=”http://www.3kbo.com/people/richard.hancock/foaf.rdf#i“/>
…
</gr:BusinessEntity>

This makes sense for my simple case, since as a sole trader I am the BusinessEntity. When viewed in Firefox using the Tabulator Extension owl:sameAs also provides an inferred link from my foaf file to my semanticweb.rdf as shown below.

A part of the business description I don’t understand yet is how best to use the eClassOWL ontology to describe the Product or Service.

For example using the GoodRelations Annotator I selected “19 information, communication and media technology” as the Category and “1904 Software” as the Group.

This leads to http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/ontologies/eclass/5.1.4/#C_AKJ317003-tax being used in the definition of the product or service, i.e.

<gr:typeOfGood>
<gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder rdf:ID=“ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder_1″>
<rdf:type rdf:resource=”"&eco;#C_AKJ317003-tax”>
…
<gr:ProductOrServicesSomeInstancesPlaceholder>
<gr:typeOfGood>

Because of the size of the eClassOWL ontology it takes awhile to dereference this link. It would be good to be able to provide a  more user friendly reference at this point that provided a description of the product or service.

Beyond this simple example I am interested in semantic web descriptions of other more complex relationships between a BusinessEntity (when not a person) and the people involved with the business (e.g. directors, CEO etc …) and between other BusinessEntitys.

Potentially GoodRelations and eClassOWL could be used as part of an Enterprise Architecture describing the who, what, how, when, where and why of a business.

Tags: eCommerce, FOAF, LinkedData

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 7:26 pm and is filed under FOAF, Linked Data, OWL, Ontology, Semantic Web, eCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.