RVO - The Research Variable Ontology.

Enterprises today are presented with a plethora of data, tools and analytics techniques, but lack systems which help analysts to navigate these resources and identify best fitting solutions for their analytics problems. To support enterprise-level data analytics research, this paper presents Research Variable Ontology (RVO), an ontology designed to catalogue and explore essential data analytics design elements such as variables, analytics models and available data sources. RVO is specialised to support researchers with exploratory and predictive analytics problems, popularly practiced in economics and social science domains. We present the RVO design process, its schema, how it links and extends existing ontologies to provide a holistic view of analytics related knowledge and how data analysts at the enterprise level can use it. Capabilities of RVO are illustrated through a case study on House Price Prediction.