RDF Dataset Profiling - a Survey of Features, Methods, Vocabularies and Applications

Tracking #: 1679-2891

Authors: 
Mohamed Ben Ellefi
Zohra Bellahsene
John Breslin
Elena Demidova
Stefan Dietze
Julian Szymanski
Konstantin Todorov

Responsible editor: 
Lora Aroyo

Submission type: 
Survey Article
Abstract: 
The Web of Data, and in particular Linked Data, has seen tremendous growth over the past years. However, reuse and take-up of these rich data sources is often limited and focused on a few well-known and established RDF datasets. This can be partially attributed to the lack of reliable and up-to-date information about the characteristics of available datasets. While RDF datasets vary heavily with respect to the features related to quality, provenance, interlinking, licenses, statistics and dynamics, reliable information about such features is essential to enable dataset discovery and selection in tasks such as entity linking, distributed query, search or question answering. Even though there exists a wealth of works contributing to the task of dataset profiling in general, these works are spread across a wide range of communities. In this survey, we provide a first comprehensive overview of the RDF dataset profiling features, methods, tools and vocabularies. We organize these building blocks of dataset profiling in a taxonomy and illustrate the links between the dataset profiling and feature extraction approaches and several application domains. This survey is aimed towards data practitioners, data providers and scientists, spanning a large range of communities and drawing from different fields such as dataset profiling, assessment, summarization and characterization. Ultimately, this work is intended to facilitate the reader to identify the relevant features for building a dataset profile for intended applications together with the methods and tools capable of extracting these features from the datasets as well as vocabularies to describe the extracted features and make them available.
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Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 12/Jul/2017
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

After the previous rounds of revision and the replies by the authors on the reviewers' comments, it feels that this is going to be the final version: I feel it is acceptable and would be interesting reading material in the journal.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 31/Jul/2017
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I'm fine with all the last changes. Actually I am favorably impressed by how the paper has evolved between the first draft this last version.

I will make only one comment: the reference for ODRL is now outdated. The W3C POE working group is working on a new version (https://www.w3.org/TR/odrl-model/), and that is on course to replace the old one.

Review #3
By Heiko Paulheim submitted on 09/Aug/2017
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I am happy to see that the authors picked most of the suggestions raised by myself and the other reviewers.

The only suggestion I would have is that the authors incorporate their response w.r.t. the numbers in table 3 as a small statement in the paper, as I think it is required to properly interpret the table and prevent the reader from drawing false conclusions.