GoodRelations is a vocabulary that can be used to exchange information about products and services, pricing, payment options, other terms and conditions, store locations and their opening hours, and many other aspects of e-commerce, between networks of computer systems. The focus is on interoperability between Web sites and clients consuming the information given on those sites.
In essence, GoodRelations defines
GoodRelations is available as an OWL 2 DL Web ontology according to the W3C Web Ontology Language standard and can thus be used for exchanging data on the WWW, e.g. in Semantic Web and Linked Open Data projects. For more information, see the W3C Data Activity page.
GoodRelations is designed so that it fits
It is a truly generic model of information for offering any kind of goods (e.g. cameras, cars, consulting, medical treatment, etc.) to others and for specifying the expected compensation (e.g. money or other goods in barter trade) and conditions (e.g. indicating the time your offer expires or the payment methods accepted).
While it is impossible to enumerate everything one can do with GoodRelations, the most important usages are the following:
1. Search Engine Optimization for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex with schema.org: Since November 2012, GoodRelations is the official e-commerce part of schema.org. schema.org is an initiative driven by several major search engines and allows site-owners to mark-up information in their Web content so that search engines can extract and process it better, i.e. more reliably and with less effort.
In short, you can use the GoodRelations data model to add small data packets to your Web pages in HTML that represent your products and their features and prices, your stores and opening hours, payment options and the like. Search engines will then be able to understand your content better and trigger many positive effects for your site in the search results, like Google Rich Snippets, or individualized relevance ranking. For details, see GoodRelations for Semantic SEO.
2. Product Information Management (PIM/PDM) inside a single organization or a value chain: If you have to handle information about products and services from multiple sources, GoodRelations can serve as a global database schema for integrating the information, for it is typically easy to map existing data structures to GoodRelations. GoodRelations will then provide a common model to maintain, cleanse, consume, and share the data.
3. E-Commerce Data Quality Management: You can use GoodRelations to manage technical or commercial data from heterogeneous sources in graph databases (e.g. RDF triplestores) and implement data quality management projects on top of this model.