Automation of Electronic Invoice Validation using Knowledge Graph Technologies

Invoicing is a crucial part of any business’s financial and administrative activities. Nowadays, invoicing is handled in the form of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), where invoices are managed in a standardized electronic or digital format rather than on paper. In this context, EDI increases the efficiency of creating, distributing, and processing invoices. The most used standard for representing electronic invoices is EDIFACT. Yet, the validation of EDIFACT invoices is not standardized. In this work, we tackle the problem of automatically validating electronic invoices in the EDIFACT format by leveraging KG technologies. The core of our proposed solution consists of representing EDIFACT invoices as RDF knowledge graphs (KGs). We developed an OWL ontology to model EDIFACT terms with semantic descriptions. The invoice KG can be validated using SHACL constraints acquired from domain experts. We evaluated our ontology and invoice validation process. The results show that our proposed solution is complete, correct, and efficient, and significantly undercuts the efforts of current human evaluation.