Conceptual navigation in RDF graphs with SPARQL-like queries

Abstract

Concept lattices have been successfully used for information retrieval and browsing. They offer the advantage of combining querying and navigation in a consistent way. Conceptual navigation is more flexible than hierarchical navigation, and easier to use than plain querying. It has already been applied to formal, logical, and relational contexts, but its application to the semantic web is a challenge because of inference mechanisms and expressive query languages such as SPARQL. The contribution of this paper is to extend conceptual navigation to the browsing of RDF graphs, where concepts are accessed through SPARQL-like queries. This extended conceptual navigation is proved consistent w.r.t. the context (i.e., never leads to an empty result set), and complete w.r.t. the conjunctive fragment of the query language (i.e., every query can be reached by navigation only). Our query language has an expressivity similar to SPARQL, and has a more natural syntax close to description logics. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.