Good Relations and Schema.org

Today, we are pleased to announce that we are integrating e-commerce schemas from the  GoodRelations project into Schema.org. The addition of these widely adopted schemas into schema.org will make it more easy for Web publishers to express structured data about products, offers, companies, stores and related facts.

Schema.org was designed as a platform where the Web community can come together and share structured schemas that improve the ability for search engines to understand the content of Web pages. Our collaboration with GoodRelations exemplifies this: GoodRelations provides a rich, well known and widely used terminology for e-commerce data sharing. By integrating GoodRelations into schema.org, we make it easier for publishers to adopt, and also combine such vocabulary. Just as with IPTC rNews previously, and many other collaborations, our approach has been to bring together existing work in a way that hides multi-schema complexity behind a common datamodel. 

Effective immediately, the GoodRelations vocabulary (http://purl.org/goodrelations/) is directly available from within the schema.org site for use with both HTML5 Microdata and RDFa. Webmasters of e-commerce sites can use all GoodRelations types and properties directly from the schema.org namespace to expose more granular information for search engines and other clients, including delivery charges, quantity discounts, and product features. Enumerated lists of values remain managed at GoodRelations URLs, following our general approach for referencing 'external enumerations'.

Integrating these schemas has involved making a few decisions, and we welcome all feedback on the approach taken here. In order to have consistent naming conventions between schema.org and GoodRelations, some terms were given new names for use within schema.org. There are also a few cases where existing schema.org vocabulary differed in terminology or 'level of detail' with GoodRelations. We will continue to improve our documentation, examples and FAQ to make clearer the new expressivity that these additions bring. But we wanted to share this progress as early as possible, since it provides an important step forward for structured data and e-commerce on the Web.

Good Relations has been developed and maintained by Martin Hepp since 2002 and continues as an ongoing project. We look forward to seeing it reach new audiences via schema.org.

R.V. Guha

Google