Balloon Synopsis: A Modern Node-Centric RDF Viewer and Browser for the Web

Nowadays, the RDF data model is a crucial part of the Semantic Web. Especially web developers favour RDF serialization formats like RDFa and JSON-LD. However, the visualization of large portions of RDF data in an appealing way is still a cumbersome task. RDF visualizers in general are not targeting the Web as usage scenario or simply display the complex RDF graph directly rather than applying a human friendly facade. Balloon Synopsis tries to overcome these issues by providing an easy-to-use RDF visualizer based on HTML and JavaScript. For an ease integration, it is implemented as jQuery-plugin offering a node-centric RDF viewer and browser with automatic Linked Data enhancement in a modern tile design. 1 RDF Data is Online Most RDF Visualizations are not Linked Data and the Semantic Web increase in volume leading to huge amounts of RDF data. Today, even non-experts manage open data, extract semantic information from text and integrate these sources easily in their information system [1]. However, displaying graph-based RDF data in a human-friendly way is challenging. This paper demonstrates a modern tile-based visualization of RDF data. While there are many tools available to present RDF data to an user [2–4], most of them are not available in web-browsers and use treeor graph-based layouts. RDF visualizations should support the user to conceive information from the data quickly. Furthermore, aggregation of different knowledge sources should be possible to enable a simplified view. However, the common node-link layouts can be very space consuming and may show node or edge overlappings. As a result, even simple RDF graphs can look confusingly complex to humans. Additionally, a RDF visualization can exploit the fact, that RDF data is interlinked with other online resources. Browsing a RDF graph can be automatically extended by considering Linked Data resources. Balloon Synopsis was developed to allow Web developers an easy-to-use and embeddable RDF visualization for their website, enabling simple access and re-use of Linked Data.The key-highlights of this approach are as follows: ? The presented work was developed within the CODE and MICO project partially funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme, grant agreement number 296150 and 610480.