Abstract
Linked Data exploration is an essential task in the process of understanding, assessing, and using datasets made available in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. Current solutions for exploration of RDF data are mainly targeted at Semantic Web experts, require non-trivial deployments, and do not scale to the increasing amounts of data published in RDF. The lack of simple, intuitive, and efficient solutions for exploring RDF data, especially for lay users, is the main motivation behind the work presented in this paper. We propose RDF Surveyor, an easy-to-use and lightweight tool for exploring RDF datasets. Its visual interface hides the intricacies of Semantic Web technologies from the user, while providing intuitive overviews of datasets, class navigation, and visualization of class instances. Furthermore, RDF Surveyor does not require any installation and can handle large datasets such as DBpedia. We provide a detailed overview of RDF Surveyor and illustrate its capabilities in two different scenarios. We also analyze the uptake, performance and usability of RDF Surveyor, showing its suitability for exploring Linked Data at scale.
Highlights
With the advent of Resource Description Framework (RDF) data [1] across all domains, there is a need for exploring these datasets by Semantic Web experts, and by lay users
Exploration of Linked Data should allow prospective users to understand, assess, and select available datasets. This is especially crucial for the take-up of Linked Data by lay users that are not experts in the technicalities of Semantic Web technologies, and are in need for simple, intuitive, and efficient solutions for exploring RDF datasets
We identified a gap in the literature around visualization and explorations of Linked Data – the fact that there is a lack of a simple, yet intuitive approach and corresponding system for exploring RDF data, while at the same time being able to cope with the increase scale of the datasets published as Linked Data
Summary
With the advent of RDF data [1] across all domains, there is a need for exploring these datasets by Semantic Web experts, and by lay users. This is evidenced by the predominance of graph-based interfaces as the default representation for RDF data that has been questioned many times [5], [10], especially for lay users [11] Many of these tools offer limited support for exploration tasks; this is the case of Linked Data browsers such as LodView that present the results of dereferencing URIs in a tabular form and allow link traversal, but do not provide any overview of the dataset nor class navigation. Another important category of visual approaches over RDF data include visual query tools such as PepeSearch [11], 1http://lodview.it.
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