Visualization and Bridging on the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is currently the most evolving area of the Internet development. This second-Generation Web is based not on HTML but on XML and related technologies, such as RDF, Topic Maps, Ontologies, Namespaces, and others. The 'Semantic Web' is "a vision: the idea of data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines for automation, integration and reuse". The Semantic Web not only requires adapting existing visualisation techniques and developing new approaches, but also opens wide opportunities for their practical implementation. [1]

Aim

In this project, I would like to create a tool that starts with a file, spiders, builds and displays a graph of instance data. Once built, users will have the option to hilight certain patterns and relatinoships withing the graph. For exapmle, in a food web network, users could ask for visual indications of things like

• All of the fish
• All of the fish who eat other fish
• All of the species who eat a particular type of plankton

Users could also look for patterns between related subgraphs, i.e. show me all of the fish who are herbivores (explicitly eat non-animals); then, find any species that consume only these types of fish. Essentially, find some interesting subgraphs and then find some middle node that connects them.

Using technology from RIC, users will be presented with a list of classes. Thy can shoose a class, then optionally choose a property (either with a domain or range of that class), and again optionally choose another class to be at the opposite end of that property. Users can choose several of these and see the patterns emerge in the graph. Thus, the graph is built of instance data, but is analyzed through the ontology. Inheritance will be preserved in this search, so one could search for "Animals that eat Plants" and see all of the fish that eat plankton.

More compelling examples emerge in large networks of information. A graph of the RDF from a university department could include a lot of information, including research projects, labs, classes, etc. Isolating the graduate students in the graph and highlighting them would itself be useful. Finding the links between these students and, say, research labs or project would show links that may be useful for collaborations, highlighting common interests, etc.

Once this is implemented manually, I plan to automate the discovery of these these bridges between objects to identify potential links between subejcts or concepts that the user may not know about or anticipate.

Implementation Specifics

Group

A tiny group. Jen.

Related Research

Published Papers

Applications and Systems

• IsAViz - A Visual Authoring Tool for RDF: 14 March 2002: W3C's Semantic Web Advanced Development initiative announces the release of IsAViz, a visual environment for browsing and authoring RDF models represented as graphs. IsAViz has a 2.5D user interface allowing smooth zooming and navigation. IsAViz supports RDF/XML and N-Triple import and export, and SVG and PNG export. Developed by Emmanuel Pietriga of W3C and Xerox Research Centre Europe, IsaViz is based on the Xerox Visual Transformation Machine, Hewlett-Packard's Jena, Graphviz from AT&T Research, and Apache's Xerces. Learn more about IsaViz.
• NASA Science Organizer - ScienceOrganizer is a specialized knowledge management tool designed to enhance the information storage, organization, and access capabilities of distributed NASA science teams. ScienceOrganizer provides a common electronic repository in which science team members can store and share project information. Team members access the system through an intuitive Web-based interface that enables them to upload, download, and organize project information -- including data, documents, images, and scientific records associated with laboratory and field experiments. Information in ScienceOrganizer is "threaded", or interlinked, to enable users to locate, track, and organize interrelated pieces of scientific data. Linkages capture important semantic relationships among information resources in the repository, and these assist users in navigating through the information related to their projects.
• RDF Author- http://rdfweb.org/people/damian/RDFAuthor/ : RDFAuthor is a tool designed to ease the pain of creating rdf instance data. Authoring is largely a matter of dragging in data and binding it together using a graphical interface.

Links

• [[1]] International Symposium of Visualization on the Semantic Web

Thanks

Thanks to Dave Beckett for the suggestion of this topic and the reference to the symposium.