An Advanced Analysis Of Cloud Computing Concepts Based On The Computer Science Ontology

An Advanced Analysis of Cloud Computing Concepts
Based on the Computer Science Ontology
Paweł Lula1
, Octavian Dospinescu2,*
, Daniel Homocianu2
and Napoleon-Alexandru Sireteanu2
1
Krakow University of Economics, Krakow, Poland
2
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, 700706, Romania

Corresponding Author: Octavian Dospinescu. Email: doctav@uaic.ro
Received: 20 August 2020; Accepted: 29 September 2020
Abstract: Our primary research hypothesis stands on a simple idea: The evolution
of top-rated publications on a particular theme depends heavily on the progress
and maturity of related topics. And this even when there are no clear relations
or some concepts appear to cease to exist and leave place for newer ones starting
many years ago. We implemented our model based on Computer Science Ontol-
ogy (CSO) and analyzed 44 years of publications. Then we derived the most
important concepts related to Cloud Computing (CC) from the scientific collec-
tion offered by Clarivate Analytics. Our methodology includes data extraction
using advanced web crawling techniques, data preparation, statistical data analy-
sis, and graphical representations. We obtained related concepts after aggregating
the scores using the Jaccard coefficient and CSO Ontology. Our article reveals the
contribution of Cloud Computing topics in research papers in leading scientific
journals and the relationships between the field of Cloud Computing and the inter-
dependent subdivisions identified in the broader framework of Computer Science.
Keywords: Cloud computing scientific literature; cloud related concepts; CSO
ontology
1 Introduction
In-depth scientific studies of cloud computing have a relatively recent history. Thus, the research carried
out by Chiregi et al. [1] and Ibrahim et al. [2] highlights that journals published by Elsevier, Springer, IEEE,
Emerald, Taylor, and Wiley have been concerned with this field since 2010.
Cloud Computing has developed as a critical innovation in the field of ICT that can revolutionize the
way information resources are consumed and delivered. Thus, according to Yu et al. [3], in developing
economies, this innovation is considered a new way that can generate a new information infrastructure
with a real potential for future economic growth. The authors pointed out that, in the case of China, the
development of the cloud computing industry was achieved from an early stage (2008) through the co-
evolution of technological and institutional infrastructures, leading to a preliminary cloud ecosystem. This
process involved a wide range of different actors, from the government to business. The interaction
between these actors influenced the development of the cloud computing industry based on each
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
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work is properly cited.
Computers, Materials Continua
DOI:10.32604/cmc.2021.013771
Article
ech
T Press
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participant’s interests. It was the case of the period between 2008 and 2016. This study concludes that the
development of cloud computing technology can contribute to economic progress only through
partnerships between the government and the business environment in order to identify market
requirements and manage related risks.
Regarding the expansion of cloud computing players nationally and globally, Kshetri et al. [4] analyzes
the determinants of such an evolution. The conclusion reached is that the modeling of the cloud computing
industry and market was possible through the action of contradictory, conflicting, and paradoxical forces.
Therefore, the following facilitators and inhibitors resulted: Standards and standardization institutions,
regulatory ones, and legal regulations on cyber-control.
Ali et al. [5] shows that in developing countries, there is a tendency to reform e-Government in an
attempt to provide easily accessible and high-quality services to citizens. Although the intention is
commendable, there are still many challenges as the cost growth rate that is difficult to estimate and
control. Managing the data, information, knowledge, and hardware infrastructure is an expensive
component and creates other difficulties. The main obstacles and challenges regarding the e-Government
cloud are lack of data control [6], security, and privacy [7], access authorization, data leakage, and system
failure [8]. These challenges can lead to e-government project failures. Therefore, a solution is needed to
overcome them, and Cloud Computing plays a vital role in solving these problems.
Nowadays, the cloud computing sector is a growing field of many providers engaged in a “digital
revolution” that will make classic IT models obsolete in the next ten years. Although still evolving, many
circumstances can generate anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior in the cloud industry market [9].
Vendors may arrange peculiar or exclusive negotiations and may refuse to share technical information on
compatible products. Innovation can also be restricted by pricing and monopolistic behavior, ultimately
leading to a reduction in competition. In addition to competition law, other rules have a powerful impact
when competing in the cloud computing services industry. Concentration regulations can have a direct
influence on the process of controlling market concentration in the CC industry. In terms of mergers and
competition law, one of the main issues to be considered concerns the concept of interoperability. This
concept is particularly important in the field of cloud computing, as it has an immediate impact on
openness and competition, with an instant effect on standardization and intellectual property rights.
Taking into account the studies carried out by Song [9] and Walden et al. [10], it appears that, although
the legislative framework somehow lags behind the technological progress, competition law still plays an
important role so that dominant market players cannot abuse of their position. The ongoing use of
competition law usually means the number of analyses and investigations related to software and
hardware platform monopolies. These laws may extend to points of sale in cloud computing infrastructures.
Novais et al. [11] have studied the impact that Cloud Computing and its technologies have on the supply
chain. The analysis of specialized literature shows that there was a relationship of influence between the
adoption of cloud computing and the technological integration of partners and business processes in
the supply chain. Also, the use of Cloud Computing in the supply chain has positive effects on the
integration of information and financial flows. Topics and lines of research that have crystallized in recent
times include the relationship between cloud computing and logistics, commercial integration, and
manufacturing process integration. Research results [12–16] show that Cloud Computing supports the
integration of supply chain processes and activities because it considerably improves scalability,
flexibility, agility, adaptation to change, and supply chain planning. D’Arcy et al. [17–19] show that
commercial aspects and trends go beyond the classic limits of the supply chain by switching to mobile
cloud computing.
Cloud Computing is also to consider from the perspective of intra-organizational and inter-
organizational integration. Thus, in terms of intra-organizational integration, Cloud Computing can be
2426 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

connected with technologies and systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) [20,21], and Radio
Frequency Identification [22,23]. Research results show that Cloud Computing, together with intra-
organizational technologies, can reduce information distortions within organizations and increase the
efficiency of internal procurement processes. Regarding the inter-organizational integration, Chen et al.
[24] and Singh et al. [25] have focused mainly on the relationship between Cloud Computing and web
technologies. The results of the studies show that the efficiency and competitiveness of the supply chain
can meliorate by integrating web 2.0 technologies with Cloud Computing. In the same direction, Camara
et al. [26] show that Cloud Computing can improve the way resources are shared and distributed among
members of the supply chain, leading to an increase in the dynamics of collaborative systems.
Battleson et al. [27] and Liu et al. [28] indicate that the flexibility of Cloud Infrastructure can improve the
ability of a company to adapt and its skill to quickly integrate new IT applications, which fundamentally
changes an organization’s IT framework and the way IT resources are installed and used. In many
industries, scalability is a fundamental factor for a company to respond quickly to market changes.
Liu et al. [28] centralized the literature and concluded that the main features/dimensions of the IT
infrastructure fall into two types: flexibility and integration. Most studies highlight the flexibility of IT
infrastructure and its importance for business. Thus, flexibility [29–31] refers to concrete issues such as
rapid development and development of significant applications, hardware and software modularity,
scalability, and compatibility of infrastructure components, connectivity, and standardization of networks
and platforms in organizations. On the other hand, integration refers to issues such as the exchange of
information between different locations, products, or services, exploiting synergistic opportunities
between the components of a business, data consistency, functional integration of applications,
adaptability, and connectivity.
Jeyaraj [32] define Cloud Computing as an archetype that allows access to a usual pool of cloud
computing resources in an on-demand or pay-per-use model. Cloud computing offers more benefits to
users and organizations in terms of capital expenditures and operating expenses savings. According to
Noor et al. [19], mobile cloud computing promises several benefits, such as increased battery life,
scalability, and reliability. However, there are still challenges to face to enable ubiquitous deployment and
adoption of cloud computing. Some of these challenges include security, confidentiality and trust,
bandwidth and data transfer, data management and synchronization, energy efficiency, and heterogeneity.
Despite the benefits, some barriers restrict the use of cloud computing. Security is an important issue that
always matters. The lack of this vital feature leads to the negative impact of computational archetype,
leading to personal, ethical, and financial damage. Security challenges are analyzed on three levels:
Computational [33], communication, and data [34]. The security of cloud computing environments is
becoming increasingly important in the context of the Internet of Things and the need for integration
[35]. With the evolution of ubiquitous computing, everything connects everywhere, so these concepts
have been studied extensively in the literature [36]. However, intrusions and vulnerabilities will be more
frequent due to the complexity of the systems and the difficulty of controlling each access attempt.
Specialized studies [37] show that human society is facing an unprecedented technological evolution
that will powerfully change the way we interact with the world around us and the way we program
applications. Mobile computers and related applications have had a significant impact. Another potential
area of research is the Internet of Things (IoT) that aims to develop a smart network of interconnected
devices. There have been numerous emerging research paradigms regarding their respective fields of
research and their intersections. These include Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), cloud computing, fog
computing, IoT cloud computing, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), WoT, and SWoT (Semantic WoT). It
happens quite often that a concept refers to several paradigms or to a single paradigm that is defined by
several terms. As a result, we can say that these paradigms’ definitions are not standardized.
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2427

According to a systematic study conducted by Androcec et al. [38], there are four major categories of
interest for cloud computing ontologies, which have emerged in connection with the literature. Thus, the
proportions are as follows: Cloud resource and service description—25%, Cloud security, and privacy—
8%, Cloud interoperability—13%, and Cloud service discovery—54%. On the other hand, Al-Sayed et al.
[39] consider that a standardized ontology is still missing today.
From a technological point of view, the cloud computing approach branches in several directions. In this
regard, Boukerche et al. [40] distinguishes between concepts such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),
Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). These concepts serve to develop new
areas as cloud networks and services. There are already computing implementations for automotive
industry services. Some examples are network as a service, storage as a service, and cooperation as a
service. The implications are straightforward in terms of vehicle management in cloud computing: data
centers, traffic management, internet vehicles, urban surveillance, security, and infotainment.
Cloud computing applications also tend to develop for the chemical industry [41], contributing
decisively to the professional interpretation of data and information. Other applications and areas of the
Internet of Things category, on which Cloud Computing has a particular impact, are the following [35]:
Smart transportation solutions, remote patient monitoring, home sensors and sensors in airports, sensors
to monitor the problems that may occur in engine operation, and smart grids. Applications of interest are
also in areas such as storage over the internet, internet overhead, internet applications, and energy efficiency.
Du et al. [42] believe that cloud computing is shaping the world of cyber technologies while evolving as
the principal computing infrastructure for sharing resources like services, applications, and platforms. This
approach is called “X as a service” and brings important functionalities and current economic benefits. But in
cyberspace, cloud computing is limited because its services can only be accessed remotely. Still, it may be
necessary to access them closer to the physical location of the actual activity. However, there are many
situations related to service requests, in which cloud computing only helps to a small extent due to
“cyber-limitation”. Since SOA has become more and more popular, this new architecture has served in
the development of applications in the field of robotics. Chen [43] specified the use of SOA concepts to
generate new composite embedded systems and robotic applications; they mentioned that they even built
a prototype system. The SOA robotic architecture relies on the expansion of cloud computing—RaaS
(Robot as a Service). In a RaaS system, many robotics units provide various services to consumers,
playing the roles of the service provider, service broker, and service client [44].
As Cloud Computing developed, so did the issue of CC governance. Thus, according to Bounagui et al.
[45], through CC governance, organizations can have real control over the services provided by the CC
infrastructure. Currently, there are several different approaches to CC governance. Thus, the He [46]
model supports organizations that want to manage all their IT services using cloud computing. The model
takes into account the business objectives and aligns the CC governance with them and the need to
manage CC assets and services. The model’s purpose is to provide a benchmark for cloud service
providers that best meet the needs of end-users. The author divided CC governance into five main areas:
strategic planning, organizational alignment, service lifecycle management, policy management, and
service level management. For each of these, the processes and activities needed to ensure effective
governance of the CC are very clearly detailed.
In terms of future directions and trends in cloud computing, Varghese et al. [47] identifies several
directions for cloud computing research on information ecosystem management strategies, the
development of distributed architectures, improving the reliability of cloud systems, the impact of system
development on sustainability, and advanced security. The new architectures and facilities will have to
serve the stated requirements of the Internet of Things philosophy, in line with the challenges of
2428 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

processing large volumes of data. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that current systems
developed by human programmers will evolve into a new generation of self-learning systems.
Hakak et al. [48] shows that gamification has gained considerable interest in educational circles due to its
ability to enhance learning among students. In the future, they expect gamification to go beyond traditional
learning, resulting in issues such as scalability and modernization of learning modules. A viable solution to
these problems would be to combine gamification and cloud computing. However, the capacity of cloud
computing is still in the early stages of development. Potential applications for cloud gamification are:
courses related to Natural Language Processing, virtual reality, distributed learning system, mobile
learning, and real-time learning skills.
One of the challenges is scientifically explained by Alles [49]. Thus, this author concludes about Cloud
Computing stating that AIS (Association for Information Systems) is unable to establish a distinct role in the
clear separation between cloud computing and other fields. The AIS community fails to make a clear
distinction between cloud computing as a subject of proprietary research and cloud computing as a
method of information sharing. An approach that extends this topic may add value to the research, but at
the same time, there are risks associated with dissipating the original concept. This conclusion can be
extended even beyond the area of interest of the AIS.
The main objective of this paper is to implement a methodology for identifying the most relevant
concepts related to a particular key topic of interest, considering mainly academic writings as a source of
evaluation and determination. In our study, we started with the Cloud Computing topic. Then, we applied
the Computer Science Ontology on ISI Web of Science (WOS) data (https://apps.webofknowledge.com)
in the form of high-quality publications, as well as the evolution over time of the frequency of
publications both on the topic of interest and on the related ones.
2 Research Methodology
2.1 Goals
The authors decided to perform the analysis of:
The contribution of Cloud Computing topics from research papers in top scientific journals;
The relationships between the Cloud Computing domain and the correlated fields defined in
Computer Science.
2.2 Main Assumptions
The authors formulated the following research hypotheses:
The general analysis should stand on the exploratory text analysis of the abstracts of the papers
published in the Web of Science database. The latter contains only peer-reviewed articles of
exceptional academic quality;
The in-depth analysis should rely on ontologies; the authors decided to use the Computer Science
Ontology1
to support the analysis process.
2.3 Analysis Process
The analysis process included the following steps:
1. Data retrieval using a web scraping technique;
2. Building a model for representing the Computer Science Ontology;
1
https://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk/home
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2429

3. The ontology-based annotation of abstracts;
4. The analysis of the importance of topics related to the concept of Cloud Computing;
5. The ontology-based analysis of the relationships between the concepts identified in the abstracts.
2.3.1 Data Retrieval
With the development of Big Data computing technology, most documents in several fields became
digital, and we now have new methods and approaches to obtain quantitative research results. According
to Kim et al. [50], text mining is the technology used to classify, group, extract, search, and analyze data
to find patterns or features in a set of unstructured or structured documents written in natural language.
We propose a method for extracting information on the subject of Cloud Computing using text mining
through web scraping from the ISI WOS website and analyze concepts extracted using the Computer
Science Ontology.
As a synthesis of the methodological stages, we highlight:
The download from ISI WOS of almost 10,000 complete records with abstracts, titles, and keywords;
The development of a custom Node.Js crawler to use this data in our research and obtain up to eight
key concepts and corresponding scores for each record;
The aggregation of all scores and identification of those concepts being the most strongly related in
terms of the score using the SQL language;
The download from ISI WOS of the frequency time-series for topics corresponding to all the relevant
concepts identified previously.
Puppeteer is a Node library API that allows us to control Chrome heedlessly. Headless Chrome is a way
to run the Chrome/Chromium browser without actually running Chrome/Chromium, and we can automate
anything we do on these browsers, such as emulating a keypress, a click, and so on. With the Puppeteer
library, we can crawl Clarivate Analytics and extract the relevant articles we need for our analysis.
Access to Clarivate was due to the E-information portal (Fig. 1).
To retrieve the content of each item from the article page, we used the $eval() method from the Cherrio
library and the page.evaluate() method. The latter allows us to extract the desired results and catch errors, as
seen in Fig. 2.
Figure 1: Custom crawler to access the E-information portal
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Finally, we scraped all the details of the articles on each page and returned them in .csv format, as
seen in Fig. 3.
We queried WOS for the exact phrase of “Cloud Computing” (search by topic). Then we ﬁltered the
SCIE and SSCI WOS categories meaning publication only in journals that currently have IF and AIS 0
(see Fig. 4), according to the results of journal-focused searches provided by the Journal Citation Reports—
JCR online application at https://jcr.incites.thomsonreuters.com.
Figure 2: Method for retrieving the abstracts
Figure 3: Scraping details of articles in .csv format
Figure 4: Manually ﬁltering (ISI WOS) for the most relevant articles published in journals with IF and AIS
0 to verify the results obtained automatically, using the API
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2431

In the next step, we filtered only consistent contributions (see Fig. 5—without reprints, retractions,
editorial materials, etc.). We finally exported almost 9500 records from the ISI WOS online platform (full
record format as Windows tab-delimited) in a .txt file, which can be read by any spreadsheet program.
These records were extracted in 19 volumes of 500 lines each (almost 50 MB of text data) using the
same online platform above.
Then we concatenated for each record four parts consisting of title, authors’ keywords, additional journal
keywords, and abstract and then we removed the copyright texts from the results using a combination of text-
oriented functions in Excel for each resulting text block. We took the copyright texts out because they
generated false results. Such raw blocks served for analysis with the Computer Science Ontology.
2.3.2 Building a Model Representation of the Computer Science Ontology
The Computer Science Ontology [51] is an automatically built ontology that covers the field of computer
science with about 14 thousand topics related to 163 thousand semantic relationships. The license of the CSO
ontology is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
For the project described here, we considered two types of semantic relationships:
The superTopicOf relationship that connects two different topics and indicates that the first is a parent
(direct ancestor) of the other;
The preferentialEquivalent relationship that defines alternative concepts and uses one of them as the
primary label; this relationship allows the unification of different terms that refer to the same notion.
For describing the relationships between concepts corresponding to the superTopicOf connection, we
used graph models with:
Vertexes corresponding to all those concepts that appear in the superTopicOf relationships in the CSO
ontology (the names of the latter used as vertexes’ identifiers);
Edges that correspond to the superTopicOf relations (these connections lead from ancestors to
descendants defined by the superTopicOf predicate).
For building the graph model, we used the igraph package in the R language [52]. Then, for every vertex
in the graph above, a list of alternatives was defined. A list of alternative concepts for a given vertex was
created by identifying all those concepts related to a given one using the preferentialEquivalent relationship.
In the third step of the analysis, for each vertex, a list of patterns was created. These patterns were in the
form of phrases (word sequences). We generated them to facilitate the identification of concepts. In the CSO
ontology, we constructed the concept names by combining words that describe a particular term using a “_”
sign as a separator (for example, a “software engineering” concept represented by a “software_engineering”).
Non-alphabetic characters were decoded in the names using hexadecimal codes. To build patterns, the name
Figure 5: Additional filters for article type
2432 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

of a given such concept and the names of alternative ones were transformed by replacing all appearances of
the “_” signs with spaces and replacing the hexadecimal values with the corresponding characters.
In the next stage of the process described here, each word in each pattern received the “#” symbol on the
front of it. The purpose was to indicate that these words are mandatory (meaning that all words in a pattern
must appear in a given part of an abstract to annotate it with the name of the corresponding concept). Details
of the notation used to identify the patterns are available in Section 2.3.3.
Finally, the concepts together with the corresponding patterns were transformed into a text file in yaml
format and saved to a file on disk.
All the knowledge used in the consecutive stages of analysis was stored in the graph describing the CSO
ontology and in the yaml file containing all the concepts taken from the CSO ontology and the patterns that
allow their identification in the textual documents.
2.3.3 Abstracts’ Annotation
We used an annotation technique proposed in Lula et al. [53]. The data stored in the yaml file served for
performing the annotation process. The content of the yaml file acts as an associated table in which the
concept name serves as the key, and a list of patterns forms a value connected to a given key. For
example, for an “ontology_alignment” concept, a list of patterns has the following form:
[“#ontology #alignment”, “#ontology #matching”, “#ontology #mapping”]
Next, for each pattern, we built its alternative version. In it, we used all the words in their elementary
form. This lemmatization process relied on the use of the Apache OpenOffice dictionaries and the
hunspell package for the R language [54]. Then, we performed an analysis of abstracts. During this step,
we executed the following sequence of operations for each abstract:
1. The division of the text of a given abstract into phrases considering the positions of the punctuation marks.
2. For similarity calculation considering each pattern, for each phrase obtained in step 1, we used the
following algorithm: First, we checked the presence of all mandatory words. In the absence of
such a word or words, the measure of similarity was zero. If all required words were present, then
a Jaccard coefficient between a set of words in a phrase (T) and another one in a pattern (P) was
calculated using Eq. (1):
sO ¼
T P
j j
T [ P
j j
(1)
3. Then, we transformed all the words in a phrase taken from an abstract into their primary form (T0
Þ.
Next, we used Eq. (2) to calculate a Jaccard coefficient between the set T0
and a lemmatized version of
a pattern P0
ð Þ:
sL ¼
T0
P0
j j
T0
[ P0
j j
(2)
4. As a final version of a similarity measure, a maximum calculated for the values defined in the two
steps presented above was defined using Eq. (3):
s ¼ max sO; sL
ð Þ (3)
As a result of the above process for each abstract, we identified a set of patterns for which the s measure
was more than 0.
Having all the patterns identified for a given abstract, the last stage of the annotation process will take
place. At this stage, we assigned them to the appropriate concepts. And for each one, a measure of its
contribution to a given abstract was calculated using Eq. (4):
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2433

ci;j ¼ max
k
si;j;1; si;j;2; . . . ; si;j;nj

; k ¼ 1; . . . ; nj (4)
where:
ci;j—contribution of the jth concept in the ith abstract;
si;j;k—contribution on the kth pattern assigned to the jth concept in the ith abstract;
nj—number of patterns we allot to the jth concept.
Elements ci;j form a contribution matrix (Eq. (5)).
C ¼ ci;j

(5)
This matrix reveals the contribution of each concept (column of the matrix) in each abstract (row of
the matrix).
2.3.4 Analysis of the Importance of Topics Related to the Concept of Cloud Computing
In the CSO ontology, the representation of the cloud computing area uses the concept of
“cloud_computing” and its descendants.
First, we found all the direct descendants (children) of the “cloud_computing” concept. According to the
CSO ontology, the latter has 34 direct descendants. They form a list L (Eq. (6)).
L ¼ l1; l2; . . . ; ln
½ (6)
where li is the ith direct descendant (child) of the “cloud_computing” concept.
For each element of the L list, we built a set that contains a given concept and all its descendants. Let’s
assume that Di is a set containing the li concept and all its descendants. Also, we considered that, for the kth
abstract, the contribution of the li concept results from Eq. (7).
pk;i ¼ max C k; Di
½
ð Þ (7)
where C k; Di
½ is a vector composed of elements located in the matrix C , from row k and columns identified
by elements of the Di set.
Elements pk;i form a matrix P in which rows represent abstracts, and columns represent concepts from
the L list.
Next, a vector v (Eq. (8)) was defined.
vk ¼
X
i
pk;i (8)
The value vk 0 means that the kth abstract contains references to topics related to the cloud computing
area. Finally, the contribution of each concept from the L list in the whole corpus was defined (Eq. (9)).
Pi ¼
P
k sgn pk;i

P
k sgn vk
ð Þ
(9)
where sgn :
ð Þ is the signum function defined as indicated in Eq. (10).
sgn x
ð Þ ¼
1 if x , 0
0 if x ¼ 0
þ1 if x . 1
8

:
(10)
This measure Pi informs about the significance of the li concept in the whole corpus.
2434 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

2.3.5 Analysis of Relationships between Concepts Appearing in Abstracts
Within the project’s framework, we also proposed a method for analyzing the relationship between two
concepts in the CSO ontology.
Let’s assume that for a given kth abstract, a relationship between two concepts, li and lj, should be
calculated. To achieve this goal, we used the following algorithm:
1. For the concept li, we created a set Di containing the concept li and all its descendants. By analogy, a
set Dj for the concept lj.
2. Two vectors (Eqs. (11) and (12))
vk;i ¼ C k; Di
½ (11)
vk;j ¼ C k; Dj

(12)
resulted, where C k; Di
½ is a vector composed of elements located in the matrix C, from row k and
columns identified by elements of the Di set.
3. The set D is defined as indicated in Eq. (13).
D ¼ Di [ Dj (13)
4. Then, the vector wk;i with D
j j elements is defined (Eq. (14)). In this vector, we identified successive
components considering the structure of the D set. We copied the elements from the vk;i vector to the
wk;i one at positions resulting from the same parts of the D set. The remaining ones, identified by
labels appearing in the D set and not appearing in Di, are completed by values equal to 0 (Eq.
(15)). Formally it may be expressed as:
wk;i Di
½ ¼ vk;i Di
½ (14)
wk;i½D
0
i ¼ 0 (15)
where D
0
i is a complement of the Di set relative to the D set.
Similarly, the vector wk;j with D
j j elements is defined (Eqs. (16) and (17)).
wk;j Dj

¼ vk;j Dj

(16)
wk;j½D
0
j ¼ 0 (17)
5. Then, we calculated the Jaccard coefficient for the vectors wk;i and wk;j. The latter served as a measure
of similarity between the li and lj concepts as observed in the kth abstract (Eq. (18)):
simk li; lj

¼
P
a min wk;i a
½ ; wk;j a
½

P
a max wk;i a
½ ; wk;j a
½
(18)
Having the similarity measures simk li; lj

calculated for every abstract, the aggregated one, for the
whole corpus, can be defined (Eq. (19)):
sim li; lj

¼
PK
k¼1 sgn simk li; lj

K
(19)
where K represents the number of abstracts in the given corpus and means the ratio of abstracts in which
concepts related to li and lj ones, were identified simultaneously.
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2435

3 Results
3.1 Analysis of the Importance of Topics Related to the Cloud Computing Concept
We used the method presented in Section 2.3.4.
In the CSO ontology, the “cloud_computing” concept has 34 direct descendants. They form the L list:
L = [application_execution, autonomic_computing, cloud_service_providers, security_and _privacy_issues,
mobile_cloud_computing, high_availability, cloud_data, multi-tier_applications, cloud_storage,
storage_services, storage_resources, map-reduce, virtual_machines, virtualizations, resource_
provisioning, service_level_agreements, security_challenges, cluster_computing, job_execution,
cloud_infrastructures, utility_computing, computing_paradigm, distributed_computing_environment,
data-intensive_application, computing_resource, computing_environments, cloud_computing_
environments, cloud_environments, computing_services, computing_technology, cloud_computing_
services, software_as_a_service, it_infrastructures, cloud_security]
For the set of abstracts studied during the analysis, we presented the contribution of the direct
descendants of the Cloud Computing concept in Fig. 6.
Figure 6: The contribution of the direct descendants of the cloud computing concept
2436 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

3.2 Analysis of the Relationships between the Concept of Cloud Computing and Others Related to
Computer Science
We performed the analysis using the method presented in Section 2.3.5. First, the relations between the
Cloud Computing concept and the main fields within Computer Science were analyzed. The values obtained
during the analysis indicate a proportion of papers that have simultaneous references to Cloud Computing or
its descendants and the selected fields of computer science. We have shown the results in Fig. 7.
In the next part, we present relevant relationships between Cloud Computing and the first five concepts
with the highest rates (Fig. 7).
The first category of emphasized relationships refers to Cloud Computing and the main areas under the
umbrella of the Computer Network concept. We emphasize the proportion of papers with simultaneous
references to Cloud Computing and the subfields of the Computer Network in Fig. 8.
The second category of emphasized relationships focuses on Cloud Computing and the main areas
within the Internet concept. We indicated the proportion of papers with simultaneous references to Cloud
Computing and Internet subfields in Fig. 9.
The third category of emphasized relationships refers to Cloud Computing and the main areas under the
umbrella of the concept of Information Technology. We synthesized the proportion of papers with
simultaneous references to Cloud Computing and Information Technology subfields in Fig. 10.
The 4th
category of emphasized relationships is about Cloud Computing and the main areas within the
Computer Systems concept. We indicated the proportion of papers with simultaneous references to Cloud
Computing and the subfields of the Computer System in Fig. 11.
Figure 7: The Significance of relationships between cloud computing and main fields of the computer
science concept
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2437

Figure 8: The significance of relationships between cloud computing and central subfields of the computer
network concept
Figure 9: The significance of relationships between cloud computing and the principal subfields of the
internet concept
2438 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

Figure 10: The significance of relationships between cloud computing and the foremost subfields of the
information technology concept
Figure 11: The Significance of Relationships between cloud computing and central subfields of the
computer system concept
CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3 2439

The last category of emphasized relationships focuses on Cloud Computing and the main areas under the
umbrella of the Computer Security concept. We showed the proportion of papers with simultaneous
references to Cloud Computing and Computer Security subfields in Fig. 12.
From all the five categories of suggestive relationships above (Figs. 8–12) we selected practically the
most significant relationships, namely between Cloud Computing and: Telecommunication Systems and
Network Protocols (under the umbrella of the Computer Network concept), Network Protocols, and
Virtual Networks (for the more general notion of the Internet), Information Management and IT
Infrastructures (for the one of Information Technology), Distributed Computer Systems, Data
Communication Systems, Database Systems and Telecommunication Systems (for the Computer System
concept) and finally Security of Data (under the umbrella of Computer Security).
4 Conclusions
In this paper, we studied the topic of Cloud Computing based on related ISI Web of Science data, mainly
as abstracts of high-quality publications (SCIE and SSCI categories) for scientific papers published in the last
44 years.
We started with a custom data retrieval tool based on web scraping techniques. We relied on many other
approaches: preparing data using custom filters, splits, joins, and text extraction functions, a score
aggregation based on the Jaccard-coefficient, the analysis of the frequency of time-series of results using
statistical tools and, a peculiar Computer Science Ontology model representation together with the
construction of relationships between graph-based concepts, ontology-based annotations of abstracts,
analysis of the importance of related topics, and also suggestive graphical representations.
In this way, we were able to identify robust relationships supported by high scores between Cloud
Computing and two not necessarily exhaustive lists of primary and related concepts. The first includes
Computer Networks, Internet, Information Technology, Computer Systems; and Computer Security, in
Figure 12: The significance of relationships between cloud computing and the principal subfields of the
computer security concept
2440 CMC, 2021, vol.66, no.3

this particular order of importance. Regarding the afore-mentioned order of parent concepts, the second
related list includes Telecommunication Systems, Network Protocols, Virtual Networks, Information
Management, IT Infrastructures, Distributed Computer Systems, Data Communication Systems, Database
Systems and Security of Data.
In addition to the discovery of patterns hidden behind a chosen topic of interest considered in this article,
namely Cloud Computing and many others related with Computer Science, the importance of the study is
mainly a methodological one that allows the objective identification of relationships and limits when
dealing with concepts and related scientific domains, fields, and subfields.
Acknowledgement: We would like to recognize the online support of our data providers: E-information[dot]
ro, Clarivate Analytics, and ISI Web of Science Thomson Reuters. Finally, we would like to thank our
provider of office applications, development environments, and data storage and analysis solutions,
Microsoft, for the consistent support, through the Imagine (formerly Dream Spark) academic software
licensing program.
Funding Statement: Pawel Lula’s participation in the research has been carried out as part of a research
initiative financed by Ministry of Science and Higher Education within “Regional Initiative of
Excellence” Programme for 2019-2022. Project no.: 021/RID/2018/19. Total financing 11 897 131.40
PLN. The other authors received no specific funding for this study.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to report regarding this study.
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