Fulfilling the needs of a metadata creator and analyst: An investigation of RDF browsing and visualization tools

Abstract

The realization of Semantic Web vision is based on the creation and use of semantic web content which needs software tools both for semantic web developers and end users. Over the past few years, semantic web software tools like ontology editors and triple storage systems have emerged and are growing in maturity with time. While working on a large triple dataset during the course of a research aiming at a life-long "semantic" repository of personal information, besides other semantic web tools, we used several RDF browsing and visualization tools for analyzing our data. This analysis included ensuring the correctness of the data, conformance of instance data to the ontology, finding patterns and trails in the data, cross-checking and evaluating inferred data, etc. We found that many of the features needed by a metadata creator and analyst are missing from these tools. This paper presents an investigation of the tools that are used for browsing and visualizing RDF datasets. It first identifies the browsing and visualization features required by a semantic web developer and a metadata creator and analyst and then based on those features evaluates the most common RDF browsing and visualization tools available till date. We conclude this paper with recommendations for requirements to be fulfilled for future semantic web browsing and visualization. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.