SemLens

SemLens is a visual tool that combines scatter plots and semantic lenses to overcome the challenge of intuitive and efficient interaction support without limiting too much the analytical degrees of freedom and to allow for a simple yet powerful analysis of RDF data.

Abstract

Querying the Semantic Web and analyzing the query results are often complex tasks that can be greatly facilitated by visual interfaces. A major challenge in the design of these interfaces is to provide intuitive and efficient interaction support without limiting too much the analytical degrees of freedom. This paper introduces SemLens, a visual tool that combines scatter plots and semantic lenses to overcome this challenge and to allow for a simple yet powerful analysis of RDF data. The scatter plots provide a global overview on an object collection and support the visual discovery of correlations and patterns in the data. The semantic lenses add dimensions for local analysis of subsets of the objects. A demo accessing DBpedia data is used for illustration.