An empirical study of vocabulary relatedness and its application to recommender systems

When thousands of vocabularies having been published on the SemanticWeb by various authorities, a question arises as to how they are related to each other. Existing work has mainly analyzed their similarity. In this paper, we inspect the more general notion of relatedness, and characterize it from four angles: well-defined semantic relatedness, lexical similarity in contents, closeness in expressivity and distributional relatedness. We present an empirical study of these measures on a large, real data set containing 2,996 vocabularies, and 15 million RDF documents that use them. Then, we propose to apply vocabulary relatedness to the problem of post-selection vocabulary recommendation. We implement such a recommender service as part of a vocabulary search engine, and test its effectiveness against a handcrafted gold standard.