Reviewing my first research paper on EasyChair

Overall evaluation -3: (strong reject; on a scale from -3 to +3)

Reviewer's confidence 3: (medium; on a scale from 1 to 5)

Overview🔗

The paper presents a serialisation method for RDF ontologies into a flat JSON - along with a Java-based tool called rdf2json. The JSON generator is overcoming the circular structures that can be found in graphs with "mapping paths". The paper then compares the new JSON serializer to existing JSON serializers, and presents future work.

Strengths🔗

• the paper satisfies the relevance criteria of the call: it focuses on practical code pipelines around KGs ontologies; in particular its area for submission seems to fit topics “Tools for mechanizing building of knowledge graphs” and “Connections to software engineering practices, such as build tools”
• the paper has the goal of bringing incremental adoption of Semantic Web technologies for software development teams, and shares an open-source library on Github.

Weaknesses🔗

• it is not easy to follow the motivation, overall technical ideas, and main results. Not sure these are expressed in a manner that the broader ISWC audience can understand.
• the paper does not provide enough evidence to justify its key claims and conclusions.
• the novelty (insights, method) versus the other methods mentioned in the paper is not clear.

Details🔗

1/ Clarity🔗

The area for submission is not clearly articulated in the abstract or introduction. Maybe the author can refer to the call for paper and reuse some of the verbiage. For example “Tools for mechanizing building of knowledge graphs” and “Connections to software engineering practices, such as build tools”.

The paper is presenting an open-source library that is mentioned in the last sentence, maybe the author could fix this by mentioning the Java project earlier, perhaps even in the title.

Some of the key arguments are not developed. For example "they deliver information in a graph-like structure instead of a tree structure" or "The model creator uses restricted paths
to draw only the relevant branches of the final tree structure".

The structure of the paper is clear, but we might suggest the following tweak: 1-Introduction / 2-RDF2JSON: Usage and examples / 3-Comparison with existing approaches / 4-Roadmap. Anchoring the structure around the open-source library might help the author explaining the use cases and the benefits of its method.

The introduction doesn't have any figures. An architecture diagram would be welcomed, especially with the presence of entities such as: Ontologist, RDF, Triple store, Jena API, rdf2json, JSON, Developer/User.

The writing contains grammatical errors, making it hard to follow and review. For example "Simple Person ontology can be seen in Figure 1."

2/ Evidences🔗

The writing contains a lot of general claims with no evidence to back them up. This loses the adoption of the reader. Example formulas that we hope the author can improve in a future version: “trivial to many”, “quite the opposite”, “[developers] prefer”, "Data structures should be modeled by data/domain experts, and not by software developers", "Desired structure by developers", "Ontologies should be created by data experts, not by software developers", "This is very far from what is actually happening", "History repeats itself", "This is certainly not the adoption level the community is looking for".

The bibliography mentions 3 papers, including a well cited paper (1169 citations / 52 highly influential citations) to establish context, but only 1 paper is recent (2023), the rest is more than 10 years old (2012-2013), so it’s hard to see how this paper connects to recent publications. The rest of the references are not research related, including even a private consulting firm's press release. Maybe the author could aim at connecting their contribution to more numerous and more recent papers (~10 in the from 2010 to today).

3/ Novelty🔗

The paper mentions other JSON serialization methods, without highlighting what the new proposed methods improves upon. Maybe examples in the form of "before and after" could help the reader understand the novelty. For example: Person ontology with JSON-LD vs Person ontology with RDF2JSON.

The author mentions "[existing JSON serializers] deliver information in a graph-like structure in-
stead of a tree structure" and implies implicitly that the tree structure is better without explaining how and why.