Abstract
With the emergence of the Web of Data, most notably Linked Open Data (LOD), an abundance of data has become available on the web. However, LOD datasets and their inherent subgraphs vary heavily with respect to their size, topic and domain coverage, the schemas and their data dynamicity (respectively schemas and metadata) over the time. To this extent, identifying suitable datasets, which meet specific criteria, has become an increasingly important, yet challenging task to supportissues such as entity retrieval or semantic search and data linking. Particularlywith respect to the interlinking issue, the current topology of the LOD cloud underlines the need for practical and efficient means to recommend suitable datasets: currently, only well-known reference graphs such as DBpedia (the most obvious target), YAGO or Freebase show a high amount of in-links, while there exists a long tail of potentially suitable yet under-recognized datasets. This problem is due to the semantic web tradition in dealing with "finding candidate datasets to link to", where data publishers are used to identify target datasets for interlinking.While an understanding of the nature of the content of specific datasets is a crucial prerequisite for the mentioned issues, we adopt in this dissertation the notion of "dataset profile" - a set of features that describe a dataset and allow the comparison of different datasets with regard to their represented characteristics. Our first research direction was to implement a collaborative filtering-like dataset recommendation approach, which exploits both existing dataset topic proles, as well as traditional dataset connectivity measures, in order to link LOD datasets into a global dataset-topic-graph. This approach relies on the LOD graph in order to learn the connectivity behaviour between LOD datasets. However, experiments have shown that the current topology of the LOD cloud group is far from being complete to be considered as a ground truth and consequently as learning data.Facing the limits the current topology of LOD (as learning data), our research has led to break away from the topic proles representation of "learn to rank" approach and to adopt a new approach for candidate datasets identication where the recommendation is based on the intensional profiles overlap between differentdatasets. By intensional profile, we understand the formal representation of a set of schema concept labels that best describe a dataset and can be potentially enriched by retrieving the corresponding textual descriptions. This representation provides richer contextual and semantic information and allows to compute efficiently and inexpensively similarities between proles. We identify schema overlap by the help of a semantico-frequential concept similarity measure and a ranking criterion based on the tf*idf cosine similarity. The experiments, conducted over all available linked datasets on the LOD cloud, show that our method achieves an average precision of up to 53% for a recall of 100%. Furthermore, our method returns the mappings between the schema concepts across datasets, a particularly useful input for the data linking step.In order to ensure a high quality representative datasets schema profiles, we introduce Datavore| a tool oriented towards metadata designers that provides rankedlists of vocabulary terms to reuse in data modeling process, together with additional metadata and cross-terms relations. The tool relies on the Linked Open Vocabulary (LOV) ecosystem for acquiring vocabularies and metadata and is made available for the community.