SWOWS and dynamic queries to build browsing applications on linked data

The linked data initiative is pushing dataset maintainers to publish data online in a highly reusable way through a set of open standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. The variety and amount of structured data available on the Web are increasing, but their consumption is still quite limited. In particular, applications that are used to explore linked data are usually generic linked data browsers or applications with hard-coded logic tailored for specific needs. SWOWS is a platform for declarative specification of applications consuming linked data. In this paper, we describe the use of the platform-for creating browsing applications tailored to specific contexts, and show how the declarative paradigm supports the development of flexible applications. To this end, the platform has been extended to support the dynamic generation of SPARQL queries. An example of a linked data browser created with the platform is given. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.