BauDataWeb: The Austrian Building and Construction Materials Market as Linked Data

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the technical approach of and experiences gained in exposing a major share of the European building and construction materials market on the basis of the GoodRelations Web vocabulary for e-commerce. This allows for the fine-grained search for products, suppliers, and warehouses for any building-related sourcing needs. Because building materials show a very high item specificity, they are very interesting for new types of search. Also, transportation costs for building materials are very significant, which makes the distance from the warehouse to the point of consumption a critical dimension of search. Based on existing data sources, we were able to include a rich, machine-readable description of individual product features using the FreeClassOWL ontology, which allow for multi-dimensional search. The result is one of the largest and richest public datasets for a well-defined trade sector that is available on the Semantic Web.