The Computer Science Ontology is a large-scale ontology of research areas that was automatically generated using the Klink-2 algorithm on a dataset of about 16 million publications, mainly in the field of Computer Science. In the rest of the paper, we will refer to this corpus as the Rexplore dataset.
The current version of CSO includes 14,164 topics and 162,121 semantic relationships. The main root is Computer Science; however, the ontology includes also a few secondary roots, such as Linguistics, Geometry, Semantics, and so on.
CSO presents two main advantages over manually crafted categorisations used in Computer Science (e.g., 2012 ACM Classification, Microsoft Academic Search Classification). First, it can characterise higher-level research areas by means of hundreds of sub-topics and related terms, which enables to map very specific terms to higher-level research areas. Secondly, it can be easily updated by running Klink-2 on a set of new publications.
