This presentation explores a year of experimentation, POCs, and research of Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies within Best Buy. It highlights three use cases where a small team approached internal data problems with semantics -- reviewing high level technical methodologies, application details, and technical and business metrics (ROI, conversion, etc.)

1. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
OF SEMANTICS IN RETAIL
A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTATION
Jay Myers, Best Buy @jaymyers

2. Broken data

3. IMPORTANT INFORMATION
GETS FILTERED

4. COMMON DATA FLOW INTO CMS/ PIM
Data Source(s) PIM/ CMS
with
schema
Accepted
data
Discarded
data
RDBMS

5. SEMANTIC METHOD
Data Source(s) RDBMS
D2RQ
RDF & SPARQL

6. COMPLETE DATA + SEMANTICS = DISCOVERY
+ +

7. Product relationships

8. MOST ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS
DON’T PROJECT RELATIONSHIP
DATA

9. CUSTOMERS WANT TO KNOW
WHICH PRODUCTS WORK
TOGETHER

10. Product Ontology
Vendor Named Graph
Vendor Named Graph
Best Buy Product Data (RDF)
Data Source(s)
JSON-LD services

11. The product long tail

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

13. 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
“

14. BRING BACK SERENDIPITY!

15. Best Buy Product Data/
Triplestore
SPARQL
1688401
2699008
3194853
1754208
8526165
7394087
4760848
2610041
5000832
SKU Results Promo builder
Dev and biz
ideation

16. CONVERSION
11x 9x 5x
“Stocking Stuffers” Valentine’s Day St Patrick’s Day
* vs. standard site conversion

17. CHALLENGES
• Enterprise data is still a mess
• Ontologies/ vocabularies are misunderstood
• IT focuses on systems, not data
• Integration into Enterprise systems

18. POSITIVES
• Leadership is on board
• Ontology is now a “thing” internally
• Positive results from experimentation drive business interest

19. @JAYMYERS