Case studies/Ravensburg

= Mobile Commerce with GoodRelations in Ravensburg =

Ravensburg is the first city in the world that publishes almost complete information about its local businesses in the form of RDF/XML based on the GoodRelations vocabulary. There is also a mobile application that uses semantic technology to guide locals and tourists to matching businesses.

Overview
Ravensburg is a town in the southern part of Germany with almost 1,000 years of history as a center of trade and business. In the Middle Ages, it was an Imperial Free City and its "Great Ravensburg Trading Society" (Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft) owned shops and trading companies all over Europe (cf. Wikipedia).

On April 14, 2011, Ravensburg became the first city in the world to publish an almost complete set of high-quality information about shops, tourist attractions, medical services, and many other points of interest using latest generation Semantic Web technology, namely the GoodRelations vocabulary for e-commerce, which was also invented in Ravensburg.

GoodRelations Usage
For almost all shops and businesses in the city center of Ravensburg, there is a GoodRelations-based description of the location, its opening hours, a basic category information, and information on whether the business accepts Ravensburg gift vouchers.

Currently, the data is exposed as a set of RDF/XML files accessible via the XML sitemap at


 * http://www.wifo-ravensburg.de/rdf/sitemap.xml

For instance, the car dealer Autohaus Dreher GmbH has the following RDF representation at (translated to Turtle syntax for readability):
 * http://www.wifo-rv.de/rdf/semanticweb29.rdf

Relevance
Of all businesses, restaurants, and other points of interest in the historic city center, close to 99 % are currently included in the public dataset. A major share of the points of interest data includes opening hours information, based on the GoodRelations standard, a common computer language for exposing business information, which is being used by companies like Google, Yahoo, Bestbuy, Volkswagen, and many others.

While GoodRelations is popular around the world, the Ravensburg data is unique in several ways:


 * Completeness and coverage: Basically all points of interest in the city are included in the more than 700 records.
 * Data quality: The data is regularly updated. All opening hours information has been validated by contacting the respective owners. While we cannot guarantee that 100 % of the data is valid, it is definitely one of the best quality-controlled data sets on the Semantic Web.
 * Ready for real-world use cases: Ravensburg is an important center of trade and tourism, with many visitors from near and far. The dataset can be easily integrated into novel mobile services of any kind, e.g. smartphone applications.
 * Extensible: The data complies with all relevant W3C standards for the Semantic Web and can thus be easily integrated with other data based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Further Information
For further information, see the dedicated Web page at
 * http://www.lieber-ravensburg.de/developer/