Using Chained Views and Follow-Up Queries to Assist the Visual Exploration of the Web of Big Linked Data

The Web of Linked Open Data (LOD) provides access to a great number of dynamic datasets containing valuable information to support decision-making processes in diverse application domains while being publicly accessible and up-to-date. While information visualization techniques are useful to explore, analyze, and explain relationships within LOD data, the existing tools are limited to visualizing a single dataset at a time and, often, use static and preprocessed data. In this article, we leverage the linked aspect of LOD to support the dynamic integration of data into a visualization system by connecting views and distributed LOD datasets using the so-called follow-up queries. We demonstrate how our approach uses dynamic SPARQL queries to integrate external data into the exploration flow through visualization techniques and enrich the ongoing analysis. We ran a semi-structured interview to assess the usefulness of our approach, which results were encouraging while showing its relevance to explore big linked data.