VizLOD: Schema Extraction and Visualization of Linked Open Data

Even though the concept of Linked Open Data has been around for over two decades, understanding a new dataset still remains as a challenging task demanding lot of time and effort. Its flexibility of integrating multiple ontologies/vocabularies in itself creates a challenge as it leads to difficulty in understanding the schema of the dataset. In this paper, we propose VizLOD, a web based tool that extracts schema information by inferring ontological characteristics based on the triples in the LOD data sources. SPARQL queries are used for this purpose. The extracted schema information is visualized using an interactive node-link graph that eases the cognitive load on the users. To add clarity to the dataset, instance view is also provided in tabular form and as an instance level graph. Our preliminary experiments have shown some promising results for VizLOD.