Frequently Asked Questions

See below a list of our most frequently asked questions.

The Computer Science Ontology (CSO) is a large-scale ontology of research areas that was automatically generated using the Klink-2 algorithm on the Rexplore dataset, which consists of about 16 million publications, mainly in the field of Computer Science. Please read more about it here.
We are extremely grateful if you wish to contribute to the Computer Science Ontology. However, we need you to sign up to our portal. Once logged in, you will be have a personalised portal where you can provide different kinds of feedbacks. For more info, please see the page on participation.
Some functionalities might not be optimised for all browsers. We therefore encourage our users to use this portal with Google Chrome in full-size.
There are no specific requirements to join the CSO portal. It is open to anyone. However, we do expect our contributors to have at least specific knowledge in some of the branches of the Computer Science Ontology. Regardless of this, feel free to flag up any sort of bugs and mistakes.
To err is human. If you realised you made a mistake go to your contribution history and edit/delete all your feedbacks.
You can access the data in two ways. The first is by exploring our ontology through this portal. See the our homepage. In addition, you can access the data in bulk. You can download the current version of the ontology and load it in your personal triple store. See the Downloads page.
The Computer Science Ontology is licensed under a CC BY 4.0.
Yes. We do use cookies to enhance the experience of the user when using this portal. Learn more.
When users sign up to the portal, we collect minimal personal information. This information is securely stored in our database using encryption and they are not shared with any third parties.
If you experience an issue with your user account, please send us an email at: kmi-cso@open.ac.uk.
We send an activation code to registered email, a couple of minutes within the signup. Be sure to check your spam folder.
You can cite both CSO and CSO Portal with:
Salatino, Angelo A., Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Andrea Mannocci, Francesco Osborne, and Enrico Motta. "The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas." International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey (CA), USA, 2018. http://oro.open.ac.uk/55484/