Publikationen

Research depends to a large degree on the availability and quality of primary research data, i.e., data generated through experiments and evaluations. While the Web in general and Linked Data in particular provide a platform and the necessary technologies for sharing, managing and utilizing research data, an ecosystem supporting those tasks is still missing. The vision of the CODE project is the establishment of a sophisticated ecosystem for Linked Data. Here, the extraction of knowledge encapsulated in scientific research paper along with its public release as Linked Data serves as the major use case. Further, Visual Analytics approaches empower end users to analyse, integrate and organize data. During these tasks, specific Big Data issues are present.

Linked Data has grown to become one of the largest availableknowledge bases. Unfortunately, this wealth of data remains inaccessi-ble to those without in-depth knowledge of semantic technologies. Wedescribe a toolchain enabling users without semantic technology back-ground to explore and visually analyse Linked Data. We demonstrateits applicability in scenarios involving data from the Linked Open DataCloud, and research data extracted from scientific publications. Our fo-cus is on the Web-based front-end consisting of querying and visuali-sation tools. The performed usability evaluations unveil mainly positiveresults confirming that the Query Wizard simplifies searching, refiningand transforming Linked Data and, in particular, that people using theVisualisation Wizard quickly learn to perform interactive analysis taskson the resulting Linked Data sets. In making Linked Data analysis ef-fectively accessible to the general public, our tool has been integratedin a number of live services where people use it to analyse, discover anddiscuss facts with Linked Data.

In an interconnected world, Linked Data is more importantthan ever before. However, it is still quite dicult to accessthis new wealth of semantic data directly without havingin-depth knowledge about SPARQL and related semantictechnologies. Also, most people are currently used to consumingdata as 2-dimensional tables. Linked Data is by de-nition always a graph, and not that many people are used tohandle data in graph structures. Therefore we present theLinked Data Query Wizard, a web-based tool for displaying,accessing, ltering, exploring, and navigating Linked Datastored in SPARQL endpoints. The main innovation of theinterface is that it turns the graph structure of Linked Datainto a tabular interface and provides easy-to-use interactionpossibilities by using metaphors and techniques from currentsearch engines and spreadsheet applications that regular webusers are already familiar with.

Research papers are published in various digital libraries, which deploy their own meta-models and tech-nologies to manage, query, and analyze scientific facts therein. Commonly they only consider the meta-dataprovided with each article, but not the contents. Hence, reaching into the contents of publications is inherentlya tedious task. On top of that, scientific data within publications are hardcoded in a fixed format (e.g. tables).So, even if one manages to get a glimpse of the data published in digital libraries, it is close to impossibleto carry out any analysis on them other than what was intended by the authors. More effective querying andanalysis methods are required to better understand scientific facts. In this paper, we present the web-basedCODE Visualisation Wizard, which provides visual analysis of scientific facts with emphasis on automatingthe visualisation process, and present an experiment of its application. We also present the entire analyticalprocess and the corresponding tool chain, including components for extraction of scientific data from publica-tions, an easy to use user interface for querying RDF knowledge bases, and a tool for semantic annotation ofscientific data set