Hide the Stack: Toward Usable Linked Data

The explosion in growth of the Web of Linked Data has provided, for the first time, a plethora of information in disparate locations, yet bound together by machine-readable, semantically typed relations. Utilisation of the Web of Data has been, until now, restricted to the members of the community, eating their own dogfood, so to speak. To the regular web user browsing Facebook and watching YouTube, this utility is yet to be realised. The primary factor inhibiting uptake is the usability of the Web of Data, where users are required to have prior knowledge of elements from the Semantic Web technology stack. Our solution to this problem is to hide the stack, allowing end users to browse the Web of Data, explore the information it contains, discover knowledge, and use Linked Data. We propose a template-based visualisation approach where information attributed to a given resource is rendered according to the rdf:type of the instance.