Vispedia: On-Demand Data Integration For Interactive Visualization And Exploration

Wikipedia is an example of the large, collaborative, semi-structured data sets emerging on the Web. Typically, before these data sets can be used, they must transformed into structured tables via data integration. We present Vispedia, a Web-based visualization system which incorporates data integration into an iterative, interactive data exploration and analysis process. This reduces the up-front cost of using heterogeneous data sets like Wikipedia. Vispedia is driven by a keyword-query-based integration interface implemented using a fast graph search. The search occurs interactively over DBpedia's semantic graph of Wikipedia, without depending on the existence of a structured ontology. This combination of data integration and visualization enables a broad class of non-expert users to more effectively use the semi-structured data available on the Web.