VisiNav: A system for visual search and navigation on web data

Andreas Harth
2010 Journal of Web Semantics  
Web standards such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) facilitate data integration over large number of sources. The resulting interlinked datasets describe objects, their attributes and links to other objects. Such datasets are amenable for queries beyond traditional keyword search and for visualisation beyond a simple list of links to documents. Given that data integrated from the open web exhibits enormous variety in scope and structure, the mechanisms for interacting with such data have
more » ... to be generic and agnostic to the vocabularies used. Ideally, a system operating on web data is easy to use without upfront training. To this end, we present VisiNav, a system based on an interaction model designed to easily search and navigate large amounts of web data (the current system contains over 18.5m RDF triples aggregated from 70k sources). In this paper we introduce a formal query model comprised of four atomic operations over object-structured datasets: keyword search, object focus, path traversal, and facet specification. From these atomic operations, users incrementally assemble complex queries that yield sets of objects as result. These results can then be either directly visualised or exported to application programs or online services for further processing. The current system provides detail, list, and table views for arbitrary types of objects; and timeline and map visualisations for temporal and spatial aspects of objects.
doi:10.1016/j.websem.2010.08.001 fatcat:zkftpksfkfg2dlw7aopxeumkh4