Metamorphic data sources: A user-centric paradigm to consume linked data in interactive workspaces

In the last years, the debate about the success or failure of Linked Data (LD) has been growing. Despite the ever-increasing number of available ontologies and LD datasets, there is still a limited number of applications to let people benefit from using this huge amount of data. Some evident problems relate to the limited opportunities offered to the end users, i.e., people without skills in computer programming, to access, navigate and visualize LD. Tools supporting such tasks typically do not consider the end users’ needs; even when they provide abstraction mechanisms to avoid programming, they do not properly hide the complexity of getting oriented into the plethora of available resources. Thus, they end up to be inadequate to real daily scenarios. In this paper, we propose an approach that enables end users to create visually entry points, which we call Metamorphic Data-Sources (MDSs), to query and visualize the LD without requiring any prior knowledge of semantic Web or visualization technologies. Through the MDS visual paradigm, end users can tailor ad-hoc data sources to retrieve information on topics they are interested in. The MDS creation process is also driven by a quality model that further helps users select LD elements potentially free of data quality problems. The paper also reports on the results of a user study that we conducted to assess the validity of the MDS paradigm with respect to the user needs.