On Ranking RDF Schema Elements (and its Application in Visualization)

Ranking is a ubiquitous requirement whenever we confront a large collection of atomic or interrelated artifacts. This paper elaborates on this issue for the case of RDF schemas. Specifically, several metrics for evaluating automatic methods for ranking schema elements are proposed and discussed. Subsequently the creation of a test collection for evaluating such methods is described, upon which several ranking methods (from simple to more sophisticated) for RDF schemas are evaluated. This formal way for evaluating ranking methods, apart from yielding credible and repeatable results, gave us some interesting insights to the problem. Finally, our experiences from exploiting these ranking methods for visualizing RDF schemas, specifically for deriving and visualizing top-k schema subgraphs, are reported.