Presenting and Navigating Styled RDF using Context-maps

This paper introduces context-maps based on the concept browser Conzilla as a user-friendly interface to formal knowledge that is expressed in RDF. Context-maps provide ways to visualize and edit RDF as graphs, where selected resources and statements may be presented in a styled fashion. An important problem to adress is the fact that RDF expressions are verbose, complex and not very intuitive to work with directly. Our solution, context-maps, allows parts of RDF graphs to be summa- rized, suppressed and presented in a form that is more comprehensible to humans. Also, context-maps support the use of richer visual languages such as UML in our presentations. In order to support various author friendly features, such as extensibility, annotation, reuse, etc., context-maps are expressed in RDF. This allows them to be embedded in the knowledge they describe, and to be processed by generic RDF tools such as low level editors and exible search engines. Through the use of RDF, context-maps are given the necessary power and exibilit y to maintain a one-to-one relationship between the visual interface and the represented formal knowledge. Context-maps make heavy use of referring techniques and matching pat- terns in which variables are introduced. Context-maps are additionally extended with a navigational structure which is inspired by hyperlinks.