Measuring context relevance for adaptive semantics visualizations

Semantics visualizations enable the acquisition of information to amplify the acquisition of knowledge. The dramatic increase of semantics in form of Linked Data and Linked-Open Data yield search databases that allow to visualize the entire context of search results. The visualization of this semantic context enables one to gather more information at once, but the complex structures may as well confuse and frustrate users. To overcome the problems, adaptive visualizations already provide some useful methods to adapt the visualization on users' demands and skills. Although these methods are very promising, these systems do not investigate the relevance of semantic neighboring entities that commonly build most information value. We introduce two new measurements for the relevance of neighboring entities: The Inverse Instance Frequency allows weighting the relevance of semantic concepts based on the number of their instances. The Direct Relation Frequency inverse Relations Frequency measures the relevance of neighboring instances by the type of semantic relations. Both measurements provide a weighting of neighboring entities of a selected semantic instance, and enable an adaptation of retinal variables for the visualized graph. The algorithms can easily be integrated into adaptive visualizations and enhance them with the relevance measurement of neighboring semantic entities. We give a detailed description of the algorithms to enable a replication for the adaptive and semantics visualization community. With our method, one can now easily derive the relevance of neighboring semantic entities of selected instances, and thus gain more information at once, without confusing and frustrating users.