Idle tinkering - products, barcodes, freebase & wikidi

A little bit more work was done on products.freebaseapps.com this weekend. Products.freebaseapps.com simply grabs all Consumer products and renders them out as RDFa - as good relations info.

I did a bit of work to make the site more human friendly and to encourage random users who come across it to start editing.

All of that done, I still can't for the life of me get the Google Rich Snippets tool to actually render anything happily. Couple that with a variety of RDFa validators and other tools being out of action/upset with the markup in a most confusing way; and you start to think this linked data stuff is tricky...

While testing  and pounding my head against a brick wall I did come across wikidi.

I explored a bit, but couldn't decide - the content they are providing is largely freebase sourced; but there has been other data integrated (ie: prices). It's under a creative commons licence, but there's no 'bulk download' or other functionality - so getting data back out usefully is difficult.
There's no RDF/RDFa or other structured markup either - so this site is a bit of a black hole. I'm not sure I like knowing my contributions to open data are going into a location like that.

DotNetNuke, RDFa and GoodRelations via NB_Store

Martin Hepp says:

The latest release of the NB_Store module for e-commerce sites based on DotNetNuke CMS seems to support GoodRelations in RDFa.

See here for details:

http://nbstore.codeplex.com/releases/view/45017

Good Relations, meet Freebase

Freebase Products, with RDFa of Good Relations in them.

What does it mean?

Well, if you were to gather up all of the RDF about Dyson DC25 Upright Ball Vacuums, you could find a product listing (try the 'see also' links) from Ebay, Amazon, etc etc.

It also means that this will all show up in Yahoo's index, possibly Google's too.