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European Semantic Web Conference

ESWC 2022: The Semantic Web pp 165–182Cite as

The Problem with XSD Binary Floating Point Datatypes in RDF

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS,volume 13261)

Abstract

The XSD binary floating point datatypes are regularly used for precise numeric values in RDF. However, the use of these datatypes for knowledge representation can systematically impair the quality of data and, compared to the XSD decimal datatype, increases the probability of data processing producing false results. We argue why in most cases the XSD decimal datatype is better suited to represent numeric values in RDF. A survey of the actual usage of datatypes on the relevant subset of the December 2020 Web Data Commons dataset, containing 19 453 060 341 literals from real web data, substantiates the practical relevancy of the described problem: 29%–68% of binary floating point values are distorted due to the datatype.

Keywords

  • Data Quality
  • Datatypes
  • Floating Point Numbers
  • Knowledge Graphs
  • Numerical Stability
  • RDF
  • XSD

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Fig. 1.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 3.

Notes

  1. 1.

    integer, long, int, short, byte, nonNegativeInteger, positiveInteger, unsignedLong, unsignedInt, unsignedShort, unsignedByte, nonPositiveInteger, and negativeInteger.

  2. 2.

    As the XSD recommendation refers to IEEE 754-2008 version of the standard, we do not refer to the subsequent IEEE 754-2019 version.

  3. 3.

    https://microformats.org.

  4. 4.

    https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/microdata.html.

  5. 5.

    http://schema.org, current version 13.0.

  6. 6.

    https://wikiba.se/, SPARQL endpoint example: https://query.wikidata.org.

  7. 7.

    Example:

  8. 8.

    https://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/.

  9. 9.

    https://jena.apache.org/.

  10. 10.

    https://protege.stanford.edu/.

  11. 11.

    Lexical mappings (roundTiesToEven rounding scheme): \({73.1} \rightarrow {73.099\,998\,474\,1}...\) and \({0.1} \rightarrow {0.100\,000\,001\,4}...\), Interval calculations: \({73.099\,998\,474\,1}...\,\pm \,{0.100\,000\,001\,4}...\).

  12. 12.

    http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/#results-2020-1.

  13. 13.

    https://commoncrawl.org/2020/10/september-2020-crawl-archive-now-available/.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/jsonld-java/jsonld-java/blob/v0.13.1/core/src/main/java/com/github/jsonldjava/core/RDFDataset.java#L673.

  15. 15.

    Prefixes used for results presentation: dcterms: http://purl.org/dc/terms/, dv: http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#, gr: http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#, rdf: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#, rev: http://purl.org/ stuff/rev#, schema: http://schema.org/, use: http://search.yahoo.com/sear chmonkey-datatype/use/, vcard: http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#, xsd: http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#.

  16. 16.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200919100939/https://open.nrw/dataset/telefonverzeichnis-alphabetisch-oktober-2019-odp.

  17. 17.

    \( \frac{\sum _{\rm T10NIFP literals}{\rm Measures}\,1 \& 2}{\sum _{\texttt {xsd:double},\texttt {xsd:float} \text {literals Measure}\,3}}\,\approx \,0.29 \), \( \frac{\sum _{\texttt {xsd:double},\texttt {xsd:float} \text {literals}}\text {Measures}\,1 \& 2}{\sum _{\texttt {xsd:double},\texttt {xsd:float} \text {literals}}\text {Measure}\,3}\,\approx \,0.68 \).

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Alsayed Algergawy, Felicitas Löffler, Samira Babalou, Sheeba Samuel, Sirko Schindler, Eberhard Zehendner, and the first author’s supervisor Birgitta König-Ries, as well as 10 anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Heinz Nixdorf Chair for Distributed Information Systems, Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Jan Martin Keil & Merle Gänßinger

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  1. Jan Martin Keil
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Contributions

Study conception and design, analysis and interpretation of results, and draft manuscript preparation were performed by Jan Martin Keil. Data collection was performed by Merle Gänßinger and Jan Martin Keil. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jan Martin Keil .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

    Paul Groth

  2. Universidad Simón Bolívar, Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Hannover, Niedersachsen, Germany

    Maria-Esther Vidal

  3. Institut Polytechnique de Paris "DIG", Télécom ParisTech, Palaiseau, France

    Fabian Suchanek

  4. University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA, USA

    Pedro Szekley

  5. IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Pavan Kapanipathi

  6. LaSIGE, Fac de Ciencias,Edif C6, Pis0 3, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Dr. Catia Pesquita

  7. University of Nantes, Nantes, France

    Hala Skaf-Molli

  8. Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Minna Tamper

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Keil, J.M., Gänßinger, M. (2022). The Problem with XSD Binary Floating Point Datatypes in RDF. In: , et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06981-9_10

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