The GoodRelations ontology, which is in use by companies in the e-commerce arena such as Best Buy and Overstock.com, now has a complement to its capabilities. The Product Types Ontology is a service for providing GoodRelations-compatible OWL DL class definitions for some 300,000 types of real-world products or services that have an entry in the English version of Wikipedia.

Not only are the classes it provides valuable for GoodRelations — the ontology also developed by Dr. Martin Hepp’s E-Business + Web Science Research Group to describe product, price and company data – but also for other Semantic Web or Linked Open Data apps.

The Product Types Ontology steps in where DBpedia leaves off, as the latter’s identifiers can’t be utilized to indicate class membership. As is explained by the minds behind the Product Types Ontology, “DBpedia URIs cannot be used for modeling the type of real-world objects, in particular in the context of the GoodRelations ontology, because

1. they lack a suitable semantics for being used as classes, and
2. they are not valid OWL DL.

For the majority of the 3.5 million Wikipedia entries, DBpedia offers a very useful representation for the Semantic Web. However, it does not provide a useful RDF representation for the more than 300,000 Wikipedia that describe types of objects, while we urgently need more authoritative class definitions for very specific things.”

GoodRelations properties such as gr:weight, gr:condition, gr:isConsumablefor can be used in conjunction to describe typical characteristics of the object that is indicated to be a laser printer, or a golf club, or whatever it may be.

Want all the class definitions yourself? Get the data dump file here. It’s pointed out that the file has only those classes that have already been requested from their individual URIs at least once, as you can’t predict which of the millions of Wikipedia entries actually comprise useful and needed class definitions. The team expects to add filtering techniques so that in future the dump file will only include classes that pass a certain popularity test in RDF datasets.