IcicleQuery: A Web Search Interface for Fluid Semantic Query Construction
3rd International Workshop on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data (VOILA), (2017)Abstract
In their need to find specific entities, lay users often rely on traditional
full text searches that render, in comparison to the capabilities
of the Semantic Web, an inferior approach. However, the access to
semantic data is complicated by technological barriers that non-experts
have to overcome. Despite the attempt to make the Semantic Web more
accessible, only few user interfaces have been created so far that
combine the ease of keyword search with the structuredness of relational
queries. None of them focuses explicitly on lay users. This paper
presents an approach for closing this gap by fluidly combining the
ability of full text search and semantic search in a compact and
comprehensible query interface. Therefore, we designed and implemented
an innovative web-based interface based on the concept of Icicle
Plots retrieving search results from a hybrid data server. A first
qualitative study revealed that the interface provides an expressive
but still approachable way of querying for specific entities and
their accompanied information.
