Popularity-driven Ontology Ranking using Qualitative Features

Efficient ontology reuse is a key factor in the Semantic Web to enable and enhance the interoperability of computing systems. One important aspect of ontology reuse is concerned with ranking most relevant ontologies based on a keyword query. Apart from the semantic match of query and ontology, the state-of-the-art often relies on ontologies' occurrences in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud to determine relevance. We observe that ontologies of some application domains, in particular those related to Web of Things (WoT), often do not appear in the underlying LOD datasets used to define ontologies' popularity, resulting in ineffective ranking scores. This motivated us to investigate - based on the problematic WoT case - whether the scope of ranking models can be extended by relying on qualitative attributes instead of an explicit popularity feature. We propose a novel approach to ontology ranking by (i) selecting a range of relevant qualitative features, (ii) proposing a popularity measure for ontologies based on scholarly data, (iii) training a ranking model that uses ontologies' popularity as prediction target for the relevance degree, and (iv) confirming its validity by testing it on independent datasets derived from the state-of-the-art. We find that qualitative features help to improve the prediction of the relevance degree in terms of popularity. We further discuss the influence of these features on the ranking model.