A Framework for Exploration and Visualization of SPARQL Endpoint Information

Abstract

Widely accepted standards, such as the Resource Description Framework, have provided unified ways for data provision aiming to facilitate the exchange of information between machines. This information became of interest to a wider audience due to its volume and variety but the available formats are posing significant challenges to users with limited knowledge of the Semantic Web. The SPARQL query language alleviates this barrier by facilitating the exploration of this information and many data providers have created dedicated SPARQL endpoints for their data. Many efforts have been dedicated to the development of systems that will provide access and support the exploration of these endpoints in a semantically correct and user friendly way. The main challenge of such approaches is the diversity of the information contained in the endpoints, which renders holistic or schema specific solutions obsolete. We present here an integrated platform that supports the users to the querying, exploration and visualization of information contained in SPARQL endpoints. The platform handles each query result independently based only on its characteristics, offering an endpoint and data schema agnostic solution. This is achieved through a Decision Support System, developed based on a knowledge base containing information experimentally collected from many endpoints, that allows us to provide case-specific visualization strategies for SPARQL query results based exclusively on features extracted from the result.