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Visual SPARQL querying based on extended filter/flow graphs

Published: 27 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

SPARQL is currently the major query language for the Semantic Web. However, writing SPARQL queries is not an easy task and requires some understanding of technologies like RDF. In order to enable users without this knowledge to query linked data, visual interfaces are required that hide the SPARQL syntax and provide graphical support for query building. Based on the concept of extended filter/flow graphs, we present a novel approach for visual querying that addresses the unique specifics of SPARQL and RDF. In particular, it enables the creation of SELECT and ASK queries, though it can also be used for other query forms. In contrast to related work, the users do not need to provide any structured text input but can create the queries entirely with graphical elements. Our approach supports most features of SPARQL and hence also the construction of complex query expressions. It has been implemented in a visual querying framework and tested on different RDF datasets, including DBpedia that is used as an example in this paper. Since the filter/flow concept is empirically well-founded, we expect our approach to be very usable, which is additionally supported by the results of a qualitative user study we conducted.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AVI '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
May 2014
438 pages
ISBN:9781450327756
DOI:10.1145/2598153
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • Centro Cultura Volta: Centro Cultura Volta
  • Politecnico di Milano: Politecnico di Milano

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 May 2014

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Author Tags

  1. OWL
  2. RDF
  3. SPARQL
  4. faceted search
  5. filter/flow
  6. linked data
  7. query language
  8. semantic web
  9. visual querying
  10. visualization

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  • Research-article

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AVI' 14
Sponsor:
  • Centro Cultura Volta
  • Politecnico di Milano

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AVI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 112 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 490 submissions, 26%

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  • (2022)VloGraph: A Virtual Knowledge Graph Framework for Distributed Security Log AnalysisMachine Learning and Knowledge Extraction10.3390/make40200164:2(371-396)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2022
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