FedViz: A Visual Interface for SPARQL Queries Formulation and Execution.

Abstract

Health care and life sciences research heavily relies on the ability to search, discover, formulate and correlate data from distinct sources. Over the last decade the deluge of health care life science data and the standardisation of linked data technologies resulted in publishing datasets of great importance. This emerged as an opportunity to explore new ways of bio-medical discovery through standardised interfaces. Although the Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies help in dealing with data integration problem there remains a barrier adopting these for non-technical research audiences. In this paper we present FedViz, a visual interface for SPARQL query formulation and execution. FedViz is explicitly designed to increase intuitive data interaction from distributed sources and facilitates federated as well as non-federated SPARQL queries formulation. FedViz uses FedX for query execution and results retrieval. We also evaluate the usability of our system by using the standard system usability scale as well as a custom questionnaire, particularly designed to test the usability of the FedViz interface. Our overall usability score of 74.16% suggests that FedViz interface is easy to learn, consistent, and adequate for frequent use.