I recorded my latest Semantic Web-ish podcast last week, talking with Martin Hepp in Germany and Jamie Taylor in California. Our topic was GoodRelations, an ontology/vocabulary designed to enhance the clarity of descriptions of businesses and their products on the Web. As the GoodRelations site describes,

“GoodRelations is a language that can be used to describe very precisely whatyour business is offering. Some people call GoodRelations a ‘data dictionary’, others prefer ‘schema’ or ‘ontology’. But the name of the thing is not important. Important is that you can use GoodRelations to create a small data package that describes your productsand their features and prices, yourstores and opening hours, payment options and the like.

You simply paste this data package into your Web page using W3C’s RDFa format.”

Martin and Jamie talk about the vocabulary itself, before moving on to the some of the ways in which it transforms commerce on the Web for early adopters such as Best Buy and O’Reilly.

The conversation – and its implications – are also covered in this post on ZDNet today. Links to some of the sites and resources mentioned during our chat are included here, after the fold.

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