A conceptual framework for linked data exploration

Abstract

An increasing number of open data sets is becoming available on the Web as Linked Data (LD), many efforts has been devoted to show the potential of LD applications from the technical point of view. However, less attention has been paid to the analysis of the information seeking requirements from the user point of view. In this paper we examine the Information Seeking Process and we propose a general framework that address all its requirements in the context of LD-based applications. We support seamless integration of both Linked and non-Linked data sources and we allow designers to define complex, rank-aware result construction and exploration rules based on rank aggregation and multiple many-to-many data navigation.