1. Journal of Web Semantics 55 (2019)
Characterising Dataset Search – an Analysis of Search Logs and Data Requests
Journal of Web Semantics 55 (2019)

2. Introduction Background of Dataset Search Goal
the generation of metadata needs to be done on a property by property basis, which represents a cost for data publishers
current open data portal solutions base their metadata search on indexing free text descriptions of datasets and applying document modelling and search techniques
Goal
to advance towards the understanding of the most important properties of a dataset description from the point of view of data consumers by analysing how people search for data on current portals
reduces the time and effort
advanced search functionalities

3. Contribution
A systematic study of the patterns and specific attributes that data consumers use to search for data and how it compares with general web search.

4. Related Work Web Search Dataset Search General Web Search
Vertical Search (e.g. search, people search in Facebook)
Dataset Search
Relatively unexplored area compared to document search
Many portals are based on CKAN -> Solr -> Lucene -> TF-IDF, but in structured documents main topic or the key concepts might be mentioned only once

5. Related Work Metrics for general web search query log analysis
Query Length and Distribution
Query Types Classification
User and Session Statistics
Query Structure
Topics

6. Methodology Used three types of data in experiments
Internal search logs
Queries issued directly to the internal search capacity of a data portal into the search box.
External search logs
Queries issued through a general web search engines search as that lead to a page of the data portal.
Data requests
Data requests are a representation of information needs submitted by users of a data portal in order to get a specific dataset that they usually could not find.

7. Findings - Users Location Devices
An overwhelming majority are desktop computers (85% on average)
Time of access
Users are mostly active during weekdays, and weekends is approximately half or a third of that during week days.
Channels
the majority of users reach portals through the result page of a web search engine

8. Findings - Users Browsers
a higher share of IE users by almost 10% compared to general web browser usage
New and returning users
returning users view on average more pages and engage in longer sessions.
Search exits and refinements
much higher than that of another government website

9. Findings – Internal & External Queries
Query length
Internal queries
External queries

10. Findings – Internal & External Queries
Query types

11. Findings – Internal & External Queries
Query topics

12. Findings – Data Requests
Data Attributes
Geospatial information (n = 77.5%)
Temporal information (n = 44%)
Restriction (n = 26.5%)
Granularity (n = 24.5%)

13. Findings – Data Requests
Request Context
Representation and structure
Expected outcome
Rationale
Quality

14. Conclusion Dataset queries are generally short.
Dataset search seems to occur mostly in a work-related environment.
There is a difference in topics, length and structure between dataset queries issued directly to data portals and dataset queries issued to web search engines.
Data requests describe the data by using boundaries and restrictions about location, temporality, specific data type and/or specific granularity
The prioritary properties to describe datasets are temporal and geospatial coverage, with varying levels of granularity.