Metaphor-based Semantic Browsing in M-FIRE
Andrea Proli, Stefano Rizzi, Matteo Golfarelli · 2006
Though the syntax of RDF is designed to be humanreadable, most end-users are not familiar with it. Thus, tools have been developed that (1) generate visual presentations of RDF statements and (2) translate user actions performed on those presentations into queries over the RDF knowledge base. An open problem in this field is to guarantee a satisfactory compromise between expressivity and domain-independence. The former is meant as the capability of delivering an intuitive visualization of knowledge and some tailored navigation primitives to end-users working in a given application domain, while the latter is aimed at accomplishing a high degree of reusability. Most existing tools, e.g. [2, 3], favor domain-independence by visually presenting constructs – such as classes and specializations – that are familiar to knowledge engineers but not to domain experts. The same holds for most Protege plug-ins except Jambalaya [1], that allows users to associate custom semantics to the same graphical primitive, namely containment. Indeed, though domain-specific formalisms have a lower degree of reusability, they provide graphically richer constructs better understood by domain experts. An approach to achieve a nice trade-off between reusability and expressivity is to decouple the mechanism for transforming RDF documents into an expressive visualization from the criteria that drive the transformation. In this demonstration we present M-FIRE (Metaphorbased Framework for Information Representation and Exploration), a configurable framework for semantic browsing of RDF-based knowledge, relying on the adoption of custom metaphors. Metaphors drive the process through which visual presentations are obtained for a given document, and define how queries are generated upon user actions. MFIRE generalizes the approach pursued by current tools, which provide representations for individuals only, by allowing metaphors to specify the representation of more complex information patterns, namely sets of statements. The demonstration will be focused on (1) showing how users can perform semantic browsing by relying on domain-specific and intuitive visualizations of concepts, thus interacting in a simple manner with complex knowledge, and (2) illustrating how flexibility and reusability are effectively achieved in our framework by the use of metaphors.