Best Buy recently announced Metis Alpha, an online catalog of their products. It contains half a million items available in RDF/XML format. Metis uses the GoodRelations vocabulary to describe each product as semantic end points. GoodRelations defines a common vocabulary to identify various attributes associated with a product (e.g. price, delivery). It is supported by Google, Yahoo and as many as 10,000 other businesses.
The group at Best Buy undertook a large effort to link their catalog with common concepts in GoodRelations such as payment methods, delivery methods and customer types. They offer several APIs to browse products and reviews from the catalog.
Unfortunately, the product description is lacking a lot of content. For example, the details of the album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” which can be found under the “Details” tab on the web page cannot be found on Metis product description at the time of this writing. Some of the links still has a few issues, like pages containing invalid XML or some URI pointing to invalid RDF resources.
Initially, Best Buy’s catalog may not appeal to many developers other than those interested in selling Best Buy’s products. The metadata it exposes is fairly limited and the URI uses the store’s SKU as an identifier. If you don’t know Best Buy’s SKU for the product you are interested in, finding the product information programmatically can become very challenging.
It will be interesting to see how 3rd parties decide to use this API, and what interesting application comes out of this effort, besides online catalogues of Best Buy products with process and availability.
Written by: Gerald Burnand, NTENT CTO
References:
- Product description: http://metis.bbyopen.com/product/id/sku/3339051
- User Review: http://metis.bbyopen.com/reviews/id/sku/3339051
- Sitemap index: http://metis.bbyopen.com/product/sitemap_index.xml
- Best Buy Open API site: https://bbyopen.com/bbyopen-apis-overview
No comments:
Post a Comment