The Open University and Springer Nature launch the Computer Science Ontology

Dear all,

The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of The Open University and Springer Nature are happy to announce the release of The Computer Science Ontology (CSO) [1].

CSO is a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas in the field of Computer Science. The current version of CSO incorporates 14K topics and over 143K relationships extracted by applying the Klink-2 algorithm [2] on a dataset of about 16M scientific articles. The CSO model is an extension of the BIBO ontology which in turn builds on SKOS. It covers hierarchical relationship between topics, whether a topic contributes to another one, and whether two topics are equivalent. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) and about 60% of its topics are linked to equivalent concepts in DBpedia.

To facilitate the uptake of CSO we have developed the CSO Portal [3], a web application that enables users to download [4], explore [5], and provide feedback [6] on the ontology.

The dumps of CSO are available as OWL, N-Triples, and CSV. The CSO Portal also supports content negotiation and allows users to access the resources as HTML, RDF/XML, Turtle,  JSON-LD, and N-Triples. For instance, the resource 'semantic web' is available as RDF/XML at the URI: https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/topics/semantic%20web.rdf

CSO presents two main advantages over alternative characterizations of the field of Computer Science. First, it is produced automatically and therefore can be regularly updated with very little effort. In addition, as it is generated from a very large corpus of publications in Computer Science, it provides a much more granular characterization of this field of study than the currently available alternatives.


Best regards,
Francesco Osborne
Angelo A. Salatino
Thiviyan Thanapalasingam
Andrea Mannocci
Enrico Motta


[1] Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA). http://oro.open.ac.uk/55484/
[2] Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2015) Klink-2: Integrating Multiple Web Sources to Generate Semantic Topic Networks, International Semantic Web Conference 2015, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (USA). http://oro.open.ac.uk/43793/
[3] https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/
[4] https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/downloads
[5] https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/home
[6] https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/participate
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Received on Friday, 11 January 2019 08:20:08 UTC