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.

Martin Hepp is a professor of general management and e-business at Universität der Bundeswehr 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/

Recruited from a teaching position while studying for her doctoral degree, to build expert trading systems on Wall Street, Barbara Starr has worked in the area of Semantic Technologies for the past 2 decades in many domains and has watched the evolution of the Semantic web. She subsequently spent almost a decade at SAIC, and was PI for many government projects (including acquaint which led to Watson, HPKB, which was the genesis for the semantic web) and others. After starting her own consulting business, she then continued to work with DARPA and SAIC. Overstock was her first foray into the e-commerce and SEO world, and she has not looked back since! She currently works at AlgebraixData – The Semantic Web Company – as Vice President of product marketing.

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.