On using Product-Specific Schema.org from Web Data Commons: An Empirical Set of Best Practices
This work provides practical guidelines for researchers and small companies to leverage large-scale product data from the web, though it is incremental as it focuses on best practices rather than new methods.
The paper tackled the problem of using product-specific schema.org data from Web Data Commons by conducting an empirical study to assess its usability, resulting in the development of six empirically grounded best practices for consuming this data.
Schema.org has experienced high growth in recent years. Structured descriptions of products embedded in HTML pages are now not uncommon, especially on e-commerce websites. The Web Data Commons (WDC) project has extracted schema.org data at scale from webpages in the Common Crawl and made it available as an RDF `knowledge graph' at scale. The portion of this data that specifically describes products offers a golden opportunity for researchers and small companies to leverage it for analytics and downstream applications. Yet, because of the broad and expansive scope of this data, it is not evident whether the data is usable in its raw form. In this paper, we do a detailed empirical study on the product-specific schema.org data made available by WDC. Rather than simple analysis, the goal of our study is to devise an empirically grounded set of best practices for using and consuming WDC product-specific schema.org data. Our studies reveal six best practices, each of which is justified by experimental data and analysis.