Assisting User Browsing over Linked Data: Requirements Elicitation with a User Study

There are growing arguments that linked data technologies can be utilised to enable user-oriented exploratory search systems for the future Internet. Recently, search over linked data has been studied in different domains and contexts. However, there is still limited insight into how conventional semantic browsers over linked data can be extended to empower exploratory search, which is open-ended, multi-faceted and iterative in nature. Empirical user studies in representative domains can identify problems and elicit requirements for innovative functionality to assist user exploration. This paper presents such an approach – a user study with a uni-focal semantic data browser over several datasets linked via domain ontologies is used to inform what intelligent features are needed in order to assist exploratory search through linked data. We report main problems experienced by users while conducting exploratory search tasks, based on which requirements for algorithmic support to address the observed issues are elicited. A semantic signposting approach for extending a semantic data browser is proposed as a way to address the derived requirements.