A linked data driven visual interface for the multi-perspective exploration of data across repositories

As more data from heterogeneous sources become available, interfaces that support the federated exploration of these data are gaining importance to uncover relations between entities across multiple sources. Instead of explicit queries, visual interfaces enable a follow-your-nose style of exploration by which a user can seamlessly navigate between entities from different data sources. This requires an alignment of the ontologies used by said sources as well as the coreference resolution of entities across them. Together with Semantic Web technologies, the Linked Data paradigm provides the technological foundations to address these challenges. Nonetheless, the majority of work studies these components in isolation, focusing either on the alignment, coreference resolution, or visualization. Some interesting aspects, however, only arise when all puzzle pieces are in place. Two of these aspects are the seamless transitions between visualization and interaction paradigms as well as the combination of entity and type queries. In this work, we present a multi-perspective visual interface that enables the seamless exploration of major scientific geo-data sources that contain millions of RDF triples.