Practical Applications of Semantic Web in Retail -- Semtech 2014

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF SEMANTICS IN RETAILA YEAR OF EXPERIMENTATIONJay Myers, Best Buy @jaymyers

Broken data

IMPORTANT INFORMATIONGETS FILTERED

COMMON DATA FLOW INTO CMS/ PIM

Data Source(s) PIM/ CMSwith

schema

Accepted data

Discardeddata

RDBMS

SEMANTIC METHOD

Data Source(s) RDBMS

D2RQ

RDF & SPARQL

COMPLETE DATA + SEMANTICS = DISCOVERY

+ +

Product relationships

MOST ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS DON’T PROJECT RELATIONSHIP DATA

CUSTOMERS WANT TO KNOW WHICH PRODUCTS WORK TOGETHER

Product OntologyVendor Named Graph

Vendor Named Graph

Best Buy Product Data (RDF)

Data Source(s)

JSON-LD services

The product long tail

OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO EXPAND REVENUE BY EXPLOITING EVERY ITEM IN THE PRODUCT CATALOG

PERSONALIZATION DOESN’T UNCOVER LONG TAIL PRODUCTS

…rather than discovering new facts or perspectives when you search for news, information, or products, you will be presented with “adjacent” concepts. It’s not so much discovery of new ideas as it is exploitation of existing ideas.

Don Peppers, “The Downside of Personalization”https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140620114239-17102372-the-downside-of-personalization

“

BRING BACK SERENDIPITY!

Best Buy Product Data/ Triplestore

SPARQL

168840126990083194853175420885261657394087476084826100415000832

SKU Results Promo builder

Dev and bizideation

CONVERSION

11x 5x9x

* vs. standard site conversion

“Stocking Stuffers” Valentine’s Day St Patrick’s Day

CHALLENGES

• Enterprise data is still a mess

• Ontologies/ vocabularies are misunderstood

• IT focuses on systems, not data

• Integration into Enterprise systems

POSITIVES

• Leadership is on board

• Ontology is now a “thing” internally

• Positive results from experimentation drive business interest

@JAYMYERS