On the Status of Experimental Research on the Semantic Web

Abstract

Abstract. Experimentation is an important way to validate results of Semantic Web and Computer Science research in general. In this paper, we investigate the development and the current status of experimental work on the Semantic Web. Based on a corpus of 500 papers collected from the International Semantic Web Conferences (ISWC) over the past decade, we analyse the importance and the quality of experimental research conducted and compare it to general Computer Science. We observe that the amount and quality of experiments are steadily increasing over time. Unlike hypothesised, we cannot confirm a statistically significant correlation between a paper's citations and the amount of experimental work reported. Our analysis, however, shows that papers comparing themselves to other systems are more often cited than other papers.