Towards interoperable visualization applications over linked data
Ghislain Auguste Atemezing · Graduate School and Research Center in Digital Science (EURECOM) · 2013
The adoption of Semantic Web technologies in many institutions or government decisionmakers are often based on an actual demonstration of their potential via an application. Here the famous adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” could be rephrased as “An application is worth a billion triples”. Hence the importance of having at some point of the Life-Cycle of Linked Open Data the Application layer, aiming to provide a way to quickly consume the underlying data published. Nowadays, as many Government are opening their data, they need a way to rapidly develop smart applications for giving great insights in their data, ranging from exploration applications to more complex ones. Many tools and libraries already exist from the information visualization communities, and many of them are successfully applied to semantic web. However, many of the great applications developed since the beginning of this era of Government Linked Data lack of reusing them, not only the idea based on similar data (e.g. “Where My Money/Tax Goes” Applications for tracking Government Expenses), but also the tools or widgets used to build them. A possible use case could be the following “What application won the Semantic Web Challenge using facet views for mobile phone?” or “Which are the tools commonly used for building smart applications in Health domain?” We believe that as long as the semantic technology is being adopted, there will be always a need for creating smart applications, and developers or consumers will not necessary want to waste time reinventing the wheel, but rather focusing on the added-value of their applications. We propose in this paper an overview of types of applications built on Linked Data, a framework for assessing tools used for building those applications, and a vocabulary to describe visual applications developed on top of LOD for more interoperability and components reusability. Our proposal derives from a study of applications in different domains built in Open Data initiatives in UK, US and France. We identify two benefits of our approach: (i) it could help building a sustainable ecosystem of visual applications making use of 4-5 stars datasets, and (ii) it could make it easier to find application patterns used for creating Linked Data Applications.