An interactive guidance process supporting consistent updates of RDFS graphs

Abstract

With existing tools, when creating a new object in the Semantic Web, users benefit neither from existing objects and their properties, nor from the already known properties of the new object. We propose UTILIS, an interactive process to help users add new objects. While creating a new object, relaxation rules are applied to its current description to find similar objects, whose properties serve as suggestions to expand the description. A user study conducted on a group of master students shows that students, even the ones disconcerted by the unconventional interface, used UTILIS suggestions. In most cases, they could find the searched element in the first three sets of properties of similar objects. Moreover, with UTILIS users did not create any duplicate whereas with the other tool used in the study more than half of them did. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.