Representing and Exploiting Benchmarking Data for Optimisation and Learning

The rapid advancements in Machine Learning (ML) and Black-Box Optimisation (BBO) have led to an increased reliance on benchmarking data for evaluating and comparing algorithms across diverse domain tasks. However, the effective exploitation of this data is hindered by challenges such as syntactic variability, semantic ambiguity, and lack of standardization. In this dissertation, we address these challenges by advocating for formal semantic representation of benchmarking data through the use of ontologies. By providing standardized vocabularies and ontologies, we improve knowledge sharing and promote data interoperability across studies in ML and BBO. In the ML domain, focusing on multi-label classification (MLC), we design an ontology-based framework for semantic annotation of benchmarking data, facilitating the creation of MLCBench - a semantic catalog that enhances data accessibility and reusability. In the BBO domain, we introduce the OPTION (OPTImization algorithm benchmarking ONtology) ontology to formally represent benchmarking data, including performance data, algorithm metadata, and problem landscapes. This ontology enables the automatic integration and interoperability of knowledge and data from diverse benchmarking studies.