Semantic Tools for More Profitable Online Commerce

PART I | Increasing Product and Service Visibility through Front-end Semantic Web

Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer, bestbuy.com

Web developers have been heavily focused on providing visually rich experiences to entice users to purchase goods and services. With emerging front-end semantic technologies, there are now a number of ways to increase visibility of product offers, services, and store locations on the web using semantics. By utilizing HTML markup standards like Microformats, RDFa, and Microdata, front-end web developers can contribute to a web of product data, enabling enhanced machine learning while retaining rich visual experiences for humans. This presentation highlights current in-production semantic solutions, discusses challenges, and explores future opportunities for front-end semantic web.

PART II | SEO, RDF and GoodRelations – An Implementation by a Major Industry Online Retailer

Barbara H. Starr, Semantic Web Strategist, Ontologica
Paul Bruemmer, SEO/SEM Executive Consultant, PB Communications

A major online retailer is in the process of implementing RDFa and the goodrelations ontology on their website. They will be amongst the first members of the online retail world to take this step. The session will discuss the story and process of the adoption of GoodRelations and RDFa.

Jay Myers is a Lead Web Development Engineer for Best Buy, Co. He has over 12 years of experience implementing, managing and maintaining web sites and applications. Jay has a passion for bringing standards to commerce websites, with a particular focus on emerging front-end semantic web technologies. He co-authored the current product Microformat draft specification, and is an active supporter of the GoodRelations vocabulary for ecommerce, utilizing it for modeling consumer products, stores, and services in both RDF/XML and RDFa. Jay lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and three sons. You can read his blog at http://jay.beweep.com and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jaymyers.

Paul J. Bruemmer is an SEO/SEM Executive Consultant who has worked with brand clients Overstock, Charles Schwab, Lexis-Nexis and NASDAQ to name a few. Paul is a well-known industry columnist, having started the ClickZ Search Marketing column in the mid-90’s, he is also a contributor to iMediaConnection, Website Magazine, Search Engine Land and Chief Marketer.

Martin Hepp is a professor of general management and e-business at UniversitÃ¤t der Bundeswehr MÃ¼nchen in Germany, where he heads the e-business and Web Science Research Group. His key research interest is in using structured, linked data on a Web scale for e-business, in particular matchmaking and product data reuse. As part of his research, he developed the GoodRelations and eClassOWL ontologies, now widely used by companies like BestBuy and Yahoo for describing offers on the Web. Also, he was the organizer of more than fifteen workshops and conference tracks on conceptual modeling, Semantic Web topics, and information systems and member of more than sixty conference and workshop program committees, including ASWC, ESWC, IEEE CEC/EEE, and ECIS, and is an associate editor of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS). More information and publications are available at http://www.heppnetz.de/

Barbara Starr has had almost 30 years of experience working with semantics in industry. She left a teaching position at the University of South Africa after an offer to come to the States to build a semantically-based stock trading system in the financial industry on Wall Street. She has consulted in this technology in many other domains since, and has watched the evolution of the semantic web. She is currently the organizer of the San Diego Semantic web meetup group.