VoID-graph: Visualize Linked Datasets on the Web
This tool addresses the problem of accessibility and ease of use for researchers and practitioners working with LOD datasets, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VoID standards.
The paper tackles the complexity of generating visual diagrams for Linked Open Data (LOD) datasets by introducing VoID-graph, a standalone web-tool that visualizes diagrams directly in a browser using VoID descriptions, eliminating the need for server cooperation and simplifying setup.
The Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud diagram is a picture that helps us grasp the contents and the links of globally available data sets. Such diagram has been a powerful dissemination method for the Linked Data movement, allowing people to glance at the size and structure of this distributed, interconnected database. However, generating such image for third-party datasets can be a quite complex task as it requires the installation and understanding of a variety of tools which are not easy to setup. In this paper we present VoID-graph (http://lmatteis.github.io/void-graph/), a standalone web-tool that, given a VoID description, can visualize a diagram similar to the LOD cloud. It is novel because the diagram is autonomously shaped from VoID descriptions directly within a Web-browser, which doesn't require any server cooperation. This makes it not only easy to use, as no installation or configuration is required, but also makes it more sustainable, as it is built using Open Web standards such as JavaScript and SVG.