Open eBusiness Ontology Usage: Investigating Community Implementation of GoodRelations

GoodRelations Ontology is experiencing the first stages of mainstream adoption, with its appeal to a range of enterprises as the eCommerce ontology of choice to promote its product catalogue. As adoption increases, so too does the need to review and analyze current implementation of the ontology to better inform future usage and uptake. To comprehensively understand the implementation approaches, usage patterns, instance data and model coverage, data was collected from 105 different web based sources that have published their business and product-related information using the GoodRelations Ontology. This paper analyses the ontology usage in terms of data instantiation, and conceptual coverage using SPARQL queries to evaluate quality, usefulness and inference provisioning. Experimental results highlight that early publishers of structured eCommerce data benefit more due to structured data being more readily search engine indexable, but the lack of available product ontologies and product master datasheets is impeding the creation of a semantically interlinked eCommerce Web.