VIQUEN: A visual query engine for RDF

Dell, Nicola (2010) VIQUEN: A visual query engine for RDF. Technical Report, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington.

Abstract

The biological and biomedical communities have been developing highly structured, rich data sets for representing, analyzing and integrating complex biomed- ical knowledge on the semantic web. However, the complexity of the query languages that have been developed to access these resources makes it difficult for non-technical users to explore the data sets that have been developed, limiting the utility and wide- spread adoption of both the data sets and the query languages. We present VIQUEN, a graphical query engine designed to allow users to express sophisticated queries, which are then compiled into a more complex underlying query language. After the query has been executed, users may explore the resulting graph using VIQUEN’s graph visualiza- tion component. Preliminary evaluation suggests that VIQUEN is capable of expressing a wide variety of real use case biomedical queries.