Computing the Commonalities of Clusters in Resource Description Framework: Computational Aspects

Abstract

Clustering is a very common means of analysis of the data present in large datasets, with the aims of understanding and summarizing the data and discovering similarities, among other goals. However, despite the present success of the use of subsymbolic methods for data clustering, a description of the obtained clusters cannot rely on the intricacies of the subsymbolic processing. For clusters of data expressed in a Resource Description Framework (RDF), we extend and implement an optimized, previously proposed, logic-based methodology that computes an structure—called a Common Subsumer—describing the commonalities among all resources. We tested our implementation with two open, and very different, datasets: one devoted to public procurement, and the other devoted to drugs in pharmacology. For both datasets, we were able to provide reasonably concise and readable descriptions of clusters with up to 1800 resources. Our analysis shows the viability of our methodology and computation, and paves the way for general cluster explanations to be provided to lay users.