Evaluation Framework for Search Methods Focused on Dataset Findability in Open Data Catalogs

Abstract

Many institutions publish datasets as Open Data in catalogs, however, their retrieval remains problematic issue due to the absence of dataset search benchmarking. We propose a framework for evaluating findability of datasets, regardless of retrieval models used. As task-agnostic labeling of datasets by ground truth turns out to be infeasible in the general domain of open data datasets, the proposed framework is based on evaluation of entire retrieval scenarios that mimic complex retrieval tasks. In addition to the framework we present a proof of concept specification and evaluation on several similarity-based retrieval models and several dataset discovery scenarios within a catalog, using our experimental evaluation tool. Instead of traditional matching of query with metadata of all the datasets, in similarity-based retrieval the query is formulated using a set of datasets (query by example) and the most similar datasets to the query set are retrieved from the catalog as a result.