Domain Specific Semantic Validation of Schema.org Annotations

TL;DR

This paper presents a rule-based validation approach for schema.org annotations, focusing on domain-specific completeness and semantic consistency, demonstrated within the tourism domain.

Contribution

It introduces a novel rule-based method for validating schema.org annotations for domain relevance and semantic correctness, addressing heterogeneity challenges.

Findings

Effective validation of domain-specific schema.org annotations

Improved semantic consistency in web annotations

Demonstrated approach in tourism domain

Abstract

Since its unveiling in 2011, schema.org has become the de facto standard for publishing semantically described structured data on the web, typically in the form of web page annotations. The increasing adoption of schema.org facilitates the growth of the web of data, as well as the development of automated agents that operate on this data. Schema.org is a large heterogeneous vocabulary that covers many domains. This is obviously not a bug, but a feature, since schema.org aims to describe almost everything on the web, and the web is huge. However, the heterogeneity of schema.org may cause a side effect, which is the challenge of picking the right classes and properties for an annotation in a certain domain, as well as keeping the annotation semantically consistent. In this work, we introduce our rule based approach and an implementation of it for validating schema.org annotations from two aspects: (a) the completeness of the annotations in terms of a specified domain, (b) the semantic consistency of the values based on pre-defined rules. We demonstrate our approach in the tourism domain.