A Quantitative Survey on the Use of the Cube

There is a striking increase in the availability of statistical data in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, and the Cube vocabulary has become the de facto standard for the description of multi-dimensional data. However, the reuse of a standard vocabulary needs to pair with modeling strategies that make it easy to locate, consume and integrate information. In this paper, we developed a quantitative study on how the main concepts of the Cube vocabulary are applied in practice, using the governmental datasets identified in the 2014 LOD cloud census. Our focus was on the commonly used strategies for multi-dimensional modeling using Cube because they have an impact on the automatic location and consumption of data. The results provide feedback to work that addresses Cube usage and establish a baseline for evolution comparison.