Discovery and visual analysis of linked data for humans

Abstract

Linked Data has grown to become one of the largest available knowledge bases. Unfortunately, this wealth of data remains inaccessible to those without in-depth knowledge of semantic technologies. We describe a toolchain enabling users without semantic technology background to explore and visually analyse Linked Data. We demonstrate its applicability in scenarios involving data from the Linked Open Data Cloud, and research data extracted from scientific publications. Our focus is on the Web-based front-end consisting of querying and visualisation tools. The performed usability evaluations unveil mainly positive results confirming that the Query Wizard simplifies searching, refining and transforming Linked Data and, in particular, that people using the Visualisation Wizard quickly learn to perform interactive analysis tasks on the resulting Linked Data sets. In making Linked Data analysis effectively accessible to the general public, our tool has been integrated in a number of live services where people use it to analyse, discover and discuss facts with Linked Data.