Visualization

We have focused on the development of interfaces to explore and visualize Semantic Web knowledge bases. We have focused on RDFScape, a plugin that allows to integrate Semantic Web knowledge basis in Cytoscape. The objectives for this hackathons were:

• to make the interface more user friendly
• to improve robustness
• to collect application cases and demo.

During the hackathon, the interface has been re-designed and large part of the code have been rewritten to automatize many tasks and reduced the complexity exposed to the user. In this re-implementation, the plugins allows Cytoscape to be used either as:

• an interface to query and visualize remote sparql endpoint
• a tool with its integrated trisplestore (not over sparql!)
• a tools for interactive analysis and reasoning on ontologies and RDF models.

These three operation modes have been partioned in order to simplify the user experience in specific tasks. The general robustness and the quality of the user experience has greatly improved.

The re-design of the plugin is not finished yet, but almost 50% of it has been completed. Most notably most of the parts that required joint cooperation with the Cytoscape team.

We didn't have the time to proceed with a collection of use cases, though we hope these will come from participants when the plugin is fully operational.

Francois also illustrated the use of RelFinder?, which is promising, under specific cirumstances (performant endpoint and "local enough" selections)