Peter F. Patel-Schneider

Analyzing Schema.org

Schema.org is a way to add machine-understandable information to web pages that is processed by the major search engines to improve search performance. The definition of schema.org is provided as a set of web pages plus a partial mapping into RDF triples with unusual properties, and is incomplete in a number of places. This analysis of and formal semantics for schema.org provides a complete basis for a plausible version of what schema.org should be.

CogMap: A Cognitive Support Approach to Property and Instance Alignment

The iterative user interaction approach for data integration proposed by Falconer and Noy can be generalized to consider interactions between integration tools generators that generate potential schema mappings and users or analysis tools analyzers that select the best mapping. Each such selection then provides high-confidence guidance for the next iteration of the integration tool. We have implemented this generalized approach in CogMap, a matching system for both property and instance alignments between heterogeneous data. The generator in CogMap uses the instance alignment from the previous iteration to create high-quality property alignments and presents these alignments and their consequences to the analyzer. Our experiments show that multiple iterations as well as the interplay between instance and property alignment serve to improve the final alignments.

An End-to-End Conversational Second Screen Application for TV Program Discovery

In this article, we report on a multiphase R&D effort to develop a conversational second screen application for TV program discovery. Our goal is to share with the community the breadth of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language (NL) technologies required to develop such an application along with learnings from target end-users. We first give an overview of our application from the perspective of the end-user. We then present the architecture of our application along with the main AI and NL components, which were developed over multiple phases. The first phase focuses on enabling core functionality such as effectively finding programs matching the user’s intent. The second phase focuses on enabling dialog with the user. Finally, we present two user studies, corresponding to these two phases. The results from both studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our application in the target domain.