Use of OWL and Semantic Web Technologies at Pinterest

Pinterest is a popular Web application that has over 250 million active users. It is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas for recipes, fashion, weddings, home decoration, and much more. In the last year, the company adopted Semantic Web technologies to create a knowledge graph that aims to represent the vast amount of content and users on Pinterest, to help both content recommendation and ads targeting. In this paper, we present the engineering of an OWL ontology---the Pinterest Taxonomy---that forms the core of Pinterest's knowledge graph, the Pinterest Taste Graph. We describe modeling choices and enhancements to WebProt\'eg\'e that we used for the creation of the ontology. In two months, eight Pinterest engineers, without prior experience of OWL and WebProt\'eg\'e, revamped an existing taxonomy of noisy terms into an OWL ontology. We share our experience and present the key aspects of our work that we believe will be useful for others working in this area.

WebProtégé: A Cloud-Based Ontology Editor

We present WebProt\'eg\'e, a tool to develop ontologies represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). WebProt\'eg\'e is a cloud-based application that allows users to collaboratively edit OWL ontologies, and it is available for use at https://webprotege.stanford.edu. WebProt\'ege\'e currently hosts more than 68,000 OWL ontology projects and has over 50,000 user accounts. In this paper, we detail the main new features of the latest version of WebProt\'eg\'e.

Populous: A tool for populating ontology templates

We present Populous, a tool for gathering content with which to populate an ontology. Domain experts need to add content, that is often repetitive in its form, but without having to tackle the underlying ontological representation. Populous presents users with a table based form in which columns are constrained to take values from particular ontologies; the user can select a concept from an ontology via its meaningful label to give a value for a given entity attribute. Populated tables are mapped to patterns that can then be used to automatically generate the ontology's content. Populous's contribution is in the knowledge gathering stage of ontology development. It separates knowledge gathering from the conceptualisation and also separates the user from the standard ontology authoring environments. As a result, Populous can allow knowledge to be gathered in a straight-forward manner that can then be used to do mass production of ontology content.