The magic continues as we try to move the technology dial forward on bestbuy.com. Along with some other fun forward-thinking stuff, we also encoded all our music product detail pages with RDFa, featuring such great vocabularies as GoodRelations, the Music Ontology, Dublin Core, Facebook OpenGraph markup, and Google’s (Rich Snippets) Breadcrumbs RDFa spec to provide a complete front-end semantic solution to assist machines in reaching valuable product data directly through the browser.
Now I know many of you aren’t the CD buyin’ kind (what the heck is a CD?!), but the following Justin Bieber example can serve as an example for physical media as well as digital scenarios.
Feast your eyes on the human version of Justin Bieber in all his teenage glory as he funks it up with the greatest artists of our time like Ludacris, Usher, and Jessica Jarrell (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/My+World+2.0+-+CD/9771571.p?id=2086661&skuId=9771571):
Running it through an RDFa distiller produces some interesting data results. First the GoodRelations offering:
Breaking the offer down, we see this offer has two price specifications. The first specifies the current price. The second highlights the standard retail price (list). Hey, it looks like this masterpiece is on sale!
The second part of the gr:Offer focuses on the product details including UPC (EAN), SKU, product image, and product type, etc.
So let’s talk deeper product details data next. Music releases have evolved from focusing on the entire album to diving into track details. Of course, any serious Bieber fan will want to consume every last second of every track, but the less infatuated fans purchase individual tracks instead. The Music Ontology provides a perfect foundation to list and highlight track details:
There’s no question that Bieber fans will be praising his work and want to share on Facebook. Since OpenGraph has become the rage in the semantic world (second only to Bieber himself), we’ve added og: meta information in the head of our HTML:
If you run J.B. through the official Facebook URL Linter product details are extracted:
This product page is an object on the OpenGraph!
I encourage you to run your parsers against any one of our music product detail pages and share the results. Work is ongoing to provide an XML sitemap just for music products — stay tuned for more information. In the meantime, I’m waiting for internet sensation Rebecca Black to muster up some more hits to throw on a full album so we can mark it up in RDFa.
* Disclaimer: the opinions of Justin Bieber and related artists is that of the author and not that of Best Buy, Co., Inc., it’s subsidiaries or employees.







Rebecca Black rocks.