As the Web evolves in an integrated and interlinked knowledge space thanks to the growing amount of published Linked Open Data, the need to nd solutions that enable the scholars to discover, explore and analyse the underlying research data emerges. Scholars, typically non-expert technology users, lack of in-depth understanding of the underlying semantic technology which limits their ability to interpret and query the data. We present a visual work how to connect scholars and scientificc resources on the Web of Data. We allow scholars to move from exploratory analysis in academic social networks to exposing relations between these resources. We allow them to reveal experts in a particular field and discover relations in and beyond their research communities. This paper aims to evaluate the potential of such a visual work ow to be used by non-expert users to interact with the semantically enriched data and familiarize with the underlying dataset.

1. A Visual Workflow to Explore
the Web of Data for Scholars
Anastasia Dimou, Laurens De Vocht, Mathias Van
Compernolle, Erik Mannens, Peter Mechant and Rik Van de Walle
Ghent University – iMinds – Multimedia
Big Scholar 2014, WWW14
Seoul, Korea, 8th April 2014
ResXplorer.org ewi.mmlab.be/academic

2. Exploring the Web of Scholars with Linked Data
Demand
discover, explore and analyze the research data
reuse and exchange resources

3. Exploring the Web of Scholars with Linked Data
Demand
discover, explore and analyze the research data
reuse and exchange resources
Linked Open Data

4. Exploring the Web of Scholars with Linked Data
Advantage
a substantial role
in the context of
digital libraries and archives
ideal to reveal links between resources

5. Exploring the Web of Scholars with Linked Data
Disadvantage
lack of understanding
of the semantic technology
limits scholars to optimally interpret
and query the Web of Scholars

6. Visual representations for Linked Open Data
to observe multiple aspects
of the data while controlling
and coordinating its views
to additionally reveal
the links between the data

7. Visual workflow for Linked Open Data
Visual workflow  dynamic
Visual representation  static

8. A visual workflow
for resources represented
as Linked Open Data
for exploitation, discovery and analysis
of the Web of Data for scholars
using information exploration techniques

9. Visual Workflow

10. Visual Workflow

11. Information Exploration:
Exploratory Data Analysis
The scholar gets familiar with the dataset
no explicit assumption regarding the dataset
the dataset itself reveals its underlying model
and the relationships between its resources

12. ewi.mmlab.be/academic

13. Visual Workflow

14. Coordinated view
Most detailed resources
cannot be further decomposed
a certain resource or the links between two resources
Coordinates
the narrowing and the broadening view

15. ResXplorer.org ewi.mmlab.be/academic

16. Visual Workflow

17. Information Exploration:
Exploratory Search
The scholar is familiar with the dataset
Scholars explore the dataset on their own
find novel relations between resources
Views are not limited to the data of the dataset
but relevant links to resources of other datasets
are also revealed and visualized

18. ResXplorer.org

19. Evaluation of the Visual Workflow

20. Evaluation
Demo of the workflow for the evaluation
LOD Visualization Suite (LOD/VizSuite)
implements the narrowing view
ResXplorer
implements the broadening view
ResXplorer.org ewi.mmlab.be/academic

21. Survey Results: Explorability

22. Survey Results: Complexity

23. User test results: Narrowing View

24. User test results: Broadening View

25. Conclusions
Novel visual workflow for exploring resources in the Web of Data
User interfaces based on graph visualizations
offer unique, multifaceted experience
when combined with techniques for information exploration
and enhanced with optimized search in Linked Data.
enables scholars
to view and navigate through combined aspects of research data
to come up spontaneously with observations
whose reasoning can be directly investigated

26. A Visual Workflow to Explore the Web of Data for Scholars
ResXplorer.org: http://resxplorer.org
LOD/VizSuite: http://ewi.mmlab.be/academic
Contact us
Anastasia Dimou anastasia.dimou@ugent.be @natadimou
Laurens de Vocht laurens.devocht@ugent.be @laurens_d_v