Linking Services to Websites by Leveraging Semantic Data

Websites increasingly embed semantic data for search engine optimization. The most common ontology for semantic data, schema.org, is supported by all major search engines and describes over 500 data types, including calendar events, recipes, products, and TV shows. As of today, users wishing to pass this data to their favorite applications, e.g., their calendars, cookbooks, price comparison applications or even smart devices such as TV receivers, rely on cumbersome and error-prone workarounds such as reentering the data or a series of copy and paste operations. In this paper, we present Semantic Data Mediator (SDM), an approach that allows the easy transfer of semantic data to a multitude of services, ranging from web services to applications installed on different devices. SDM extracts semantic data from the currently displayed web page on the client-side, offers suitable services to the user, and by the press of a button, forwards this data to the desired service while doing all the necessary data conversion and service interface adaptation in between. To realize this, we built a reusable repository of service descriptions, data converters, and service adapters, which can be extended by the crowd. Our approach for linking services to websites relies solely on semantic data and does not require any additional support by either website or service developers. We have fully implemented our approach and present a real-world case study demonstrating its feasibility and usefulness.