IMPROVED LINKED DATA INTERACTION THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

Thanks to Open Data initiatives the amount of data available on the Web is rapidly increasing. Unfortunately, most of these initiatives only publish raw tabular data, which makes its analysis and reuse very difficult. Linked Data principles allow for a more sophisticated approach by making explicit both the structure and semantics of the data. However, from the user experience viewpoint, published datasets continue to be monolithic files which are completely opaque or difficult to explore by making complex semantic queries. Our objective is to facilitate the user to grasp what kind of entities are in the dataset, how they are interrelated, which are their main properties and values, etc. Rhizomer is a data publishing tool whose interface provides a set of components borrowed from Information Architecture (IA) that facilitate getting an insight of the dataset at hand. Rhizomer automatically generates navigation menus and facets based on the kinds of things in the dataset and how they are described through metadata properties and values. This tool is currently being evaluated with end users that discover a whole new perspective of the Web of Data.