A Method for Generating Comparison Tables From the Semantic Web

This paper presents Versus, which is the first automatic method for generating comparison tables from knowledge bases of the Semantic Web. For this purpose, it introduces the contextual reference level to evaluate whether a feature is relevant to compare a set of entities. This measure relies on contexts that are sets of entities similar to the compared entities. Its principle is to favor the features whose values for the compared entities are reference (or frequent) in these contexts. The proposal efficiently evaluates the contextual reference level from a public SPARQL endpoint limited by a fair-use policy. Using a new benchmark based on Wikidata, the experiments show the interest of the contextual reference level for identifying the features deemed relevant by users with high precision and recall. In addition, the proposed optimizations significantly reduce the number of required queries for properties as well as for inverse relations. Interestingly, this experimental study also shows that the inverse relations bring out a large number of numerical comparison features.