Widget-based Exploration of Linked Statistical Data Spaces

摘要

Today, public statistical data plays an increasingly important role both in public policy formation and as a facilitator for informed decision-making in the private sector. In line with the increasing adoption of open data policies, the amount of data published by governments and organizations on the web is growing rapidly. To increase the value of such data, the W3C recommends the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary to facilitate the publication of data in a more structured and interlinked manner. Although important first steps toward building a web of statistical Linked Datasets have been made, providing adequate facilities for end users to interactively explore and make use of the published data remains an unresolved challenge. This paper presents a widget based approach to deal with this issue. In particular, we introduce a mashup platform that allows users lacking advanced skills and knowledge of SemanticWeb technologies to interactively analyze datasets through widget compositions and visualizations. Furthermore, we provide mechanisms for the interconnection of datasets to support sophisticated knowledge extraction.