Publication Date

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Committee Members

Pascal Hitzler (Advisor), Mateen M. Rizki (Committee Member), Yong Pei (Committee Member)

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Abstract

Over the years, the semantic web has emerged as a new generation of the world wide web featuring advanced technologies and research contributions. It has revolutionized the usage of information by allowing users to capture and publish machine-understandable data and expedite methods such as ontologies to perform the same. These ontologies help in the formal representation of a specified domain and foster comprehensive machine understanding. Although, the engineering of ontologies and usage of logic have been an integral part of the web semantics, new areas of research such as the semantic web search, linking and usage of open data on the web, and the subsequent use of these technologies in building semantic web applications have also become significant in recent times. One such research contribution that we are going to focus on is the browsing of linked RDF data. Semantic web advocates the methodology of linked data to publish structured data on the web. Most of the linked data is available as browsable RDF data which is built using triples that define statements in the form of subject-predicate-object. These triples can be tabulated by sorting the three parts into separate columns. To browse the linked data of semantic web, several web browsers such as CubicWeb, VisiNav and Pubby were designed. These browsers provide the users with a tabular browsing experience displaying the data in nested tables. Also, they help users navigate through various subjects and their respective objects with the help of links associated with them. Several other browsers such as Tabulator were developed which enable real-time editing of semantic web resources\cite{berners2008tabulator} However, with the tabulated interface, users may sometimes find it difficult to realize the relationships between the various documents. Also navigating using the links between subjects and its predicates inside the documents is more time consuming which makes the overall user experience tedious. To improve this, a linked data browser called Lodmilla is designed. Loadmilla provides a graph-based navigation where users can search and extract data associations that are hidden inside the linked data with the help of nodes. Although this method includes a better user interface, it does not display the data that is underlying in the distinct documents. In this paper, we illustrate the development of an interactive browser called the INKBrowser that navigates linked data using the schema diagram of a distinct ontology. We have tried to combine the features of both the tabular and graph-based browsers to offer a schema to data navigation where users can find the relationships between various nodes in the graph along with the data contained in each node. We have evaluated our tool by comparing it with a similar browser that navigates without a schema view. In the end, we present the adequacy of both renderings.

Page Count

62

Department or Program

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Year Degree Awarded

2019

ORCID ID

0000-0002-4824-6267

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