Adding Structure and Removing Duplicates in SPARQL Results with Nested Tables

The results of a SPARQL query are generally presented as a table with one row per result, and one column per projected variable. This is an immediate consequence of the formal definition of SPARQL results as a sequence of mappings from variables to RDF terms. However, because of the flat structure of tables, some of the RDF graph structure is lost. This often leads to duplicates in the contents of the table, and difficulties to read and interpret results. We propose to use nested tables to improve the presentation of SPARQL results. A nested table is a table where cells may contain embedded tables instead of RDF terms, and so recursively. We introduce an automated procedure that lifts flat tables into nested tables, based on an analysis of the query. We have implemented the procedure on top of Sparklis, a guided query builder in natural language, in order to further improve the readability of its UI. It can as well be implemented on any SPARQL querying interface as it only depends on the query and its flat results. We illustrate our proposal in the domain of pharmacovigilance, and evaluate it on complex queries over Wikidata.