Ranking Schemas by Focus: A Cognitively-Inspired Approach

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate knowledge base schemas, modeled as a set of entity types, each such type being associated with a set of properties, according to their focus. We model the notion of focus as “the state or quality of being relevant in storing and retrieving information”. This definition of focus is adapted from the notion of “categorization purpose”, as first defined in cognitive psychology. In turn, this notion is formalized based on a set of knowledge metrics that, for any given focus, rank knowledge base schemas according to their quality. We apply the proposed methodology on a large data set of state-of-the-art knowledge base schemas and we show how it can be used in practice (Data and scripts are available at https://github.com/knowdive/Focus ).