Faceted product search powered by the Semantic Web

This paper presents a platform for multifaceted product search using Semantic Web technology. Online shops can use a ping service to submit their RDFa annotated Web pages for processing. The platform is able to process these RDFa annotated (X)HTML pages and aggregate product information coming from different Web stores. We propose solutions for the identification of products and the mapping of the categories in this process. Furthermore, when a loose vocabulary such as the Google RDFa vocabulary is used, the platform deals with the issue of heterogeneous information (e.g., currencies, rating scales, etc.). ► For evaluation we use data sets larger than previously reported in the literature. ► We evaluate the proposed product identification and find high precision and recall. ► For category mapping, we outperform two related approaches. ► We confirm earlier results from related work, but with a difference in magnitudes. ► Our implementation is available online at XploreProducts.com.