Ontology Population from Web Product Information

Abstract

With the vast amount of information available on the Web, there is an increasing need to structure Web data in order to make it accessible to both users and machines. E-commerce is one of the areas in which growing data congestion on the Web has serious consequences. This paper proposes a framework that is capable of populating a product ontology using tabular product information from Web shops. By formalizing product information in this way, better product comparison or recommendation applications could be built. Our approach employs both lexical and syntactic matching for mapping properties and instantiating values. The performed evaluation shows that instantiating consumer electronics from Best Buy and Newegg.com results in an F1 score of approximately 77%.