Support for reusable explorations of linked data in the semantic web

Abstract

The Linked Data cloud growth is changing current Web application development. One of the first steps is to determine whether there is information already available that can be immediately reused. A recurring problem being faced in this process is finding and understanding information in such repositories, especially because often their structure is unknown beforehand. Thus, users typically have to explore the data until they understand its structure, then they are able to formulate operations to extract the desired information, and finally they have to combine the results and make them available to other users. We provide an environment which allows non-technically savvy users, but who understand the problem domain, to accomplish these tasks. They employ a combination of search, query and faceted navigation in a direct manipulation, query-by-example style interface. In this process, users can reuse solutions previously found by other users, which may accomplish sub-tasks of the problem at hand. It is also possible to create an end-user friendly interface to allow them to access the information. Once a solution has been found, it can be generalized, and optionally made available for reuse by other users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.