GoodRelations and schema.org

= GoodRelations and schema.org =

On this page, we explain the relationship between GoodRelations and schema.org.

News
We are working with the schema.org sponsors, namely Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex, on the integration of GoodRelations into the schema.org core. This will mean that you can use the full expressivity of GoodRelations directly from the schema.org namespace in Microdata syntax soon. Stay tuned!

Note: This will be an additional syntactical form of using GoodRelations for your site. GoodRelations will remain an independent vocabulary, and in RDFa and other RDF syntaxes, the original namespace of GoodRelations will remain the primary location.

Links:
 * Public Draft
 * Entry on the W3C Wiki

Overview
GoodRelations is a powerful Web vocabulary specifically designed for e-commerce scenarios, covering business, store, product, offer, warranty, payment, delivery, and other information. schema.org is a Web vocabulary maintained by Google, Yahoo, and Bing providing a single-stop schema for a broad range of domains.

For e-commerce scenarios, both schema.org and GoodRelations can be used and are fully supported by Google and Yahoo (Bing has announced GoodRelations support recently.).



The actual overlap between GoodRelations and schema.org is very small: Only 5 of 315 schema.org classes and 27 GoodRelations classes cover the same entities.



Combining Schema.org and GoodRelations in one Page
The best thing is that you do not have to choose between GoodRelations and schema.org; you can combine them to maximize the impact of your markup for the visibility in search engines and browser extensions:


 * 1) You can use GoodRelations to extend schema.org markup in Microdata syntax.
 * 2) *wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Microdata
 * 3) You can use schema.org types to extend GoodRelations markup in RDFa syntax.

Effects: Why Bother?
Important: Rich markup has more SEO effects than just seeing Rich Snippets in a search engine. They are also a very powerful means of indicating the relevance of your page for a particular query, i.e., they will be a ranking factor. This does not mean that you can manipulate the search engines to get your page ranked up for all queries, but it means that you can provide information to the search engines so that they can rank up your page for queries to which your offer is a particularly relevant match, e.g. due to


 * the geo-location of your store,
 * the countries you ship to,
 * the payment options you accept,

and more.

So don't be satisfied with your page showing rich snippets in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool! The former can be achieved in a myriad of ways, including Microformats, schema.org basic markup, product data feeds, interaction with the Google API, etc.

Only GoodRelations gives you the level of detail to send very rich relevance information to search engines. And as a side-effect, you empower browser extensions and novel recommender services to consider your offer fairly and not just based on the price tag.

Who uses GoodRelations?
Some of the largest retailers in the world have chosen to use GoodRelations over other forms of markup, including


 * BestBuy,
 * Sears,
 * Kmart, and
 * Renault.

Also, Volkswagen has started to use a massive GoodRelations deployment to communicate their car features to the market.

Stay tuned!

Best wishes

Martin Hepp Professor of E-Business GoodRelations Benevolent Dictator for Live ;-)