🖥 A web platform for generating LinkedData based Visualisations

[aorumbayev]

Greetings to all SOLID community members!

I wanted to share with you a software project currently developed by me and a team of Master’s students at Charles University in Prague called LinkedPipes Applications.

In a few sentences, the end goal of a project is a platform for creating your own data visualizers based on LinkedData extracted from provided datasets and resources. The end result is a fully functional application that can be published on a website or shared as a standalone web page. SOLID is used as decentralized storage for storing the published applications and sharing. A live dev instance available at applications.linkedpipes.com.

We are trying to focus specifically on two user categories :
• Data Journalists: people with a certain level of experience with LinkedData and Semantic web in their domain-specific areas, who will use the platform for creating and sharing the visualizers.
• Lay users: people with zero or little experience with Semantic web or LinkedData, using the created visualizers.

The platform itself also uses two other research projects done under our faculty that allow us to Discover and Extract Transform Load LinkedData into formats readable by visualizers that user would like to utilize. There are 3 visualizers being supported right now which are Google Maps, Google Chart’s based Treemap and D3's Chord.

There is a PR opened to the official solid-apps repo to list us there. @megoth pointed out lack of user quick-start guides, which is currently actively documented, and we are planning to roll out the final release in June.

Apart from my work within a project, I am also working on a thesis which is focused on building a Storage functionality for LinkedPipes platform, and the storage is of course based on heavily utilizing SOLID. The main motivation behind choosing SOLID, is the fact that we want people to not just have a simple toolset for visualizing complex LinkedData information but also have complete control over that extracted data!

It would be great to have some people willing to test our platform in June, feel free to signup via this form to be notified when we are ready for testers to use the platform Google Form. So far we had one of the representatives from BARTOC testing our platform and providing positive feedback

Please, share your thoughts on this, any feedback or comments are welcome! Stay tuned for more user-friendly quick start guides.

[aorumbayev]

Attaching a sample visualiser created using the platform.

Chord Visualiser based demo

[kidehen]

Great effort!

I’ll be having deeper a look over the coming days

[SOMNiX]

@aorumbayev

Lay users: people with zero or little experience with Semantic web or LinkedData, using the created visualizers.

I would like to try it, I have zero experience with anything here, I am not working with programming yet, but I am considering solid as an alternative, as I would like to have control over my own data. So sure, I’ll give it a try, I’ll be one of your guinea pigs. Looking forward to it!

[aorumbayev]

@SOMNiX
Great to hear that

If u want to get notified via email on testing availability, make sure to subscribe on this Google Form .

[sdmonroe]

hi @aorumbayev,
Very nice work!

1. Have you considered sunbursts as a component? Radial direction would signify rdfs:subClassOf relation, and user would choose the numeric property aggregated to produce the circle percentages, e.g size property of a file resource, or fiscalBudget property of a businessUnit resource.
2. Is LinkedPipes designed to plug into existing applications, similar to Bootstrap components? If so, what is required to embed a LinkedPipes component into an HTML5 application?

[aorumbayev]

Hey @sdmonroe,
Thank you for the feedback and questions

1. Currently we are aiming to finalize the Google Chart’s Timeline visualiser, and we currently support rather generic visualisers mentioned in main post, Google Maps, Chord and Treemap. We will do slight codebase refactoring to make it easier for other developers to fork the project and add their own visualisers in future. To answer you question, no we didn’t consider adding this visualiser at this point.

2. Yes it is one of it’s main features, refer to the screenshot below, once you create your application and publish it in SOLID, simply click share and generate Embed link. You will see a dialog for generating and iframe for embedding into html pages.