Abstract
Despite the growing popularity of knowledge graphs for managing diverse data at large scale, users who wish to pose expressive queries against such graphs are often expected to know (i) how to formulate queries in a language such as SPARQL, and (ii) how entities of interest are described in the graph. In this paper we propose a language that relaxes these expectations; the language’s operators are based on an interactive graph-based exploration that allows non-expert users to simultaneously navigate and query knowledge graphs; we compare the expressivity of this language with SPARQL. We then discuss an implementation of this language that we call RDF Explorer and discuss various desirable properties it has, such as avoiding interactions that lead to empty results. Through a user study over the Wikidata knowledge-graph, we show that users successfully complete more tasks with RDF Explorer than with the existing Wikidata Query Helper, while a usability questionnaire demonstrates that users generally prefer our tool and self-report lower levels of frustration and mental effort.
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Notes
- 1.
We do not consider blank nodes in triple patterns, which can be modeled as unprojected (aka. non-distinguished) query variables.
- 2.
- 3.
Given that the first task results in a query with a single triple pattern, the results for queries and triple patterns are the same.
- 4.
The value for \(t_{crit}\) is given by \(\alpha \) and the number of participants (\(n = 28\), giving \(n - 1 = 27\) degrees of freedom). See http://www.numeracy-bank.net/?q=t/stt/ptt/3.
- 5.
The data were found to be normally distributed and there were no clear outliers; hence use of the paired t-test is considered valid. We also conducted a non-parametric Wilcoxon test to compare the users’ ability to perform the requested tasks using the different interfaces; the results indicate a p-value of \(0.001647 < 0.05\).
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Acknowledgements
Vargas and Buil-Aranda were supported by Fondecyt Iniciación Grant No. 11170714. Hogan was supported by Fondecyt Grant No. 1181896. Vargas, Buil-Aranda and Hogan were supported by the Millenium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD).
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Vargas, H., Buil-Aranda, C., Hogan, A., López, C. (2019). RDF Explorer: A Visual SPARQL Query Builder. In: Ghidini, C., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019. ISWC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11778. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30793-6_37
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