GoodRelations is an ontology for describing products, services, prices, and business information as structured data on the web. Created by Martin Hepp at the Universitat der Bundeswehr Munich, it became one of the most successful Semantic Web vocabularies for e-commerce and was substantially integrated into Schema.org in 2012, bringing its concepts to millions of websites worldwide.
Background
Before GoodRelations, there was no widely adopted standard for describing e-commerce information in machine-readable RDF. Product catalogs, price offers, store locations, and business details were trapped in proprietary formats or unstructured HTML. Martin Hepp began developing GoodRelations around 2008, drawing on business ontology research and practical e-commerce requirements. The ontology quickly gained traction because it addressed a concrete, commercially relevant need with a well-designed model. In 2012, Schema.org incorporated the core GoodRelations concepts, giving them exposure on mainstream search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
Purpose & Scope
GoodRelations models the essential entities and relationships in e-commerce transactions. Its core classes include:
| Class | Description |
|---|---|
gr:BusinessEntity |
A company, organization, or person offering goods or services |
gr:Offering |
A specific offer to sell, lease, or provide a product or service |
gr:ProductOrService |
The item being offered |
gr:PriceSpecification |
Price details including currency, value, and applicable conditions |
gr:PaymentMethod |
Accepted payment methods |
gr:DeliveryMethod |
Available shipping or delivery options |
gr:OpeningHoursSpecification |
Business operating hours |
The ontology allows publishers to express statements such as "Company X offers Product Y at price Z with delivery method W, accepting payment methods A and B, available during specified hours." This structured information enables search engines to display rich snippets, comparison shopping engines to aggregate offers, and agents to make purchasing decisions.
Governance & Maintenance
GoodRelations was developed and maintained primarily by Martin Hepp. It was published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. While the standalone ontology has not been actively updated since its integration into Schema.org, its concepts continue to evolve within the Schema.org governance framework. The original specification and documentation remain available at the project website.
Notable Implementations
GoodRelations concepts, primarily through Schema.org, are deployed on millions of e-commerce websites. Google's product rich results, offer markup, and local business structured data all trace their lineage to GoodRelations modeling patterns. Best Buy was an early high-profile adopter. The ontology also influenced the design of e-commerce vocabularies in the broader linked data community.
Related Standards
- Schema.org -- Incorporated most GoodRelations concepts starting in 2012, becoming the primary vehicle for these patterns on the mainstream web