Browsing linked data catalogs with LODAtlas

Abstract

The Web of Data is growing fast, as exemplified by the evolution of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud over the last ten years. One of the consequences of this growth is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for application developers and end-users to find the datasets that would be relevant to them. Semantic Web search engines, open data catalogs, datasets and frameworks such as LODStats and LOD Laundromat, are all useful but only give partial, even if complementary, views on what datasets are available on the Web. We introduce LODAtlas, a portal that enables users to find datasets of interest. Users can make different types of queries about both the datasets’ metadata and contents, aggregated from multiple sources. They can then quickly evaluate the matching datasets’ relevance, thanks to LODAtlas’ summary visualizations of their general metadata, connections and contents.