Authors:
Xu Wang
;
Frank Van Harmelen
and
Zhisheng Huang
Affiliation:
Vrije University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Keyword(s):
Ontology Classification, Domain Classification, Semantic Similarity, Data Science, Google Distance.
Abstract:
Scientific datasets are increasingly stored, published, and re-used online. This has prompted major search engines to start services dedicated to finding research datasets online. However, to date such services are limited to keyword search, and provide little or no semantic guidance. Determining the scientific domain for a given dataset is a crucial part in dataset recommendation and search: ”Which research domain does this dataset belong to?”. In this paper we investigate and compare a number of novel ontology-based methods to answer that question, using the distance between a domain-ontology and a dataset as an estimator for the domain(s) into which the dataset should be classified. We also define a simple keyword-based classifier based on the Normalized Google Distance, and we evaluate all classifiers on a hand-constructed gold standard. Our two main findings are that the seemingly simple task of determining the domain(s) of a dataset is surprisingly much harder than expected (ev
en when performed under highly simplified circumstances), and that (again surprisingly), the use of ontologies seems to be of little help in this task, with the simple keyword-based classifier outperforming every ontology-based classifier. We constructed a gold-standard benchmark for our experiments which we make available online for others to use.
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