ExpLOD: Summary-based exploration of interlinking and RDF usage in the linked open data cloud

Abstract

Publishing interlinked RDF datasets as links between data items identified using dereferenceable URIs on the web brings forward a number of issues. A key challenge is to understand the data, the schema, and the interlinks that are actually used both within and across linked datasets. Understanding actual RDF usage is critical in the increasingly common situations where terms from different vocabularies are mixed. In this paper we describe a tool, ExpLOD, that supports exploring summaries of RDF usage and interlinking among datasets from the Linked Open Data cloud. ExpLOD's summaries are based on a novel mechanism that combines text labels and bisimulation contractions. The labels assigned to RDF graphs are hierarchical, enabling summarization at different granularities. The bisimulation contractions are applied to subgraphs defined via queries, providing for summarization of arbitrary large or small graph neighbourhoods. Also, ExpLOD can generate SPARQL queries from a summary. Experimental results, using several collections from the Linked Open Data cloud, compare the two summary creation approaches implemented by ExpLOD (graph-based vs. SPARQL-based). © 2010 Springer-Verlag.