Hide the Stack: Toward Usable Linked Data

  • Aba-Sah Dadzie
  • Matthew Rowe
  • Daniela Petrelli
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6643)

Abstract

The explosion in growth of the Web of Linked Data has provided, for the first time, a plethora of information in disparate locations, yet bound together by machine-readable, semantically typed relations. Utilisation of the Web of Data has been, until now, restricted to the members of the community, eating their own dogfood, so to speak. To the regular web user browsing Facebook and watching YouTube, this utility is yet to be realised. The primary factor inhibiting uptake is the usability of the Web of Data, where users are required to have prior knowledge of elements from the Semantic Web technology stack. Our solution to this problem is to hide the stack, allowing end users to browse the Web of Data, explore the information it contains, discover knowledge, and use Linked Data. We propose a template-based visualisation approach where information attributed to a given resource is rendered according to the rdf:type of the instance.

Keywords

Linked Data Knowledge Visualisation Information Visualisation Usable Interfaces Human-Computer Interaction 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Aba-Sah Dadzie
    • 1
  • Matthew Rowe
    • 2
  • Daniela Petrelli
    • 3
  1. 1.OAK Group, Dept. of Computer ScienceThe University of SheffieldUK
  2. 2.Knowledge Media InstituteThe Open UniversityMilton KeynesUK
  3. 3.Art & Design Research CentreSheffield Hallam UniversityUK

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