Exploration of semi-structured data sources
Thiago Marquez Nunes, Daniel Schwabe · 2014
Abstract. There has been a large growth of available semi-structured data on the Web, spurred both by governmental requirements for publishing public da-ta, and by private sector, for various purposes. One such large initiative is the Linked Open Data Cloud. An increasingly important activity is to make sense of such published data, often exploring it as a prelude or as initial steps to per-form some information-processing task. Exploration is then a generalization of the traditional search task, as it involves other operations beyond finding specif-ic information. The design and evaluation of exploratory frameworks is a com-plex, multi-disciplinary endeavor, with important challenges for both aspects. In this paper, we will argue the need to separate the conceptual exploratory opera-tions users may carry out over semi-structured data from the particular interface designs used to give users access to such operations. We illustrate the problems using practical examples and state-of-the-art tools and discuss how this separa-tion of concerns allows more accurate evaluation of the relevant aspects of any proposed tool or framework that aims at supporting Explorations. 1