Visual Querying LOD sources with LODeX

Abstract

The Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud has more than tripled its sources in just three years (from 295 sources in 2011 to 1014 in 2014). While the LOD data are being produced at a increasing rate, LOD tools lack in producing an high level representation of datasets and in supporting users in the exploration and querying of a source. To overcome the above problems and significantly increase the number of consumers of LOD data, we devised a new method and a tool, called LODeX, that promotes the understanding, navigation and querying of LOD sources both for experts and for beginners. It also provides a standardized and homogeneous summary of LOD sources and supports user in the creation of visual queries on previously unknown datasets. We have extensively evaluated the portability and usability of the tool. LODeX have been tested on the entire set of datasets available at Data Hub, i.e. 302 sources. In this paper, we showcase the usability evaluation of the different features of the tool (the Schema Summary representation and the visual query building) obtained on 27 users (comprising both Semantic Web experts and beginners).