Thursday, Google introduced the ability to add custom attributes to a business listing at the Local Business Center. It is of interest that the default custom attributes change by industry. The choices for additional detail fields change as well. For example with a service industry the first field is Price, in the restaurant business it is Ambiance and for a Physician it is License Information.
You can see the default choices in the samples below. Google is essentially creating a public means to access the “schema” for each industry and to also help define it. Are we seeing the beginning of the “semantic web” race?
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Is this the same schema they have been promoting in Google Base? If I remember correctly they recently decided to discourage the use of simple tags in favour of these name:value pairs.
Comment by acuth (2 comments) — March 9, 2007 @ 5:52 pm
Good question. I don’t really know. Perhaps someone could chime in here?
Mike
Comment by Mike Blumenthal (1948 comments) — March 9, 2007 @ 5:59 pm
Judging by the common attributes mentioned in relationship with restaurants (http://www.google.com/base/help/custom_fields.html) and the filters offered when searching restaurants (http://base.google.com/base/s2?btnG=Search+Base&q=restaurants&a_n0=restaurants&a_y0=9&nd=1&showrefine=1) I suspect the answer is yes.
Comment by acuth (2 comments) — March 9, 2007 @ 8:38 pm
So Google has been collecting this level of data from those uploading for a while then?
Mike
Comment by Mike Blumenthal (1948 comments) — March 9, 2007 @ 8:45 pm