Data Analysis and Related Applications 3

3Introducing an Ontology of Adolescents’ Digital Leisure

An ontology is a formal description of a set of concepts and relations in a given area or domain that describes the categories’ objects and their inter-relations. This chapter presents an ontology that was constructed to set out the basic concepts, features, characteristics and processes that concern the online leisure time of adolescents. The ontology, as well as the respective annotation tool, offer users the ability to organize and analyze data in a well-structured and systematic manner, while simultaneously allowing concept and relational analysis to draw complex conclusions and make inferences. The terminology of the ontology has been first extracted in a semi-supervised way from a large number of scientific papers, with the aid of machine learning methodologies and a specific tool implemented for this aim, and then curated by social researchers that are experts in the field. The final ontology was developed with the use of Protégé, an open-source ontology editor. Examples of diverse data analysis using the proposed tool and the respective ontology are provided.

3.1. Introduction

An ontology is a formal description of knowledge as a set of concepts of a domain that describes the categories of objects and roles which describe the relationships between these objects. It aims to model and formalize the description of the complex entities of a domain of interest, and sometimes disambiguates the meaning of terms in ...