Towards a Lay-User Interface for Querying DBpedia

As an RDF representation of information extracted from Wikipedia, DBpedia has been serving as an interlinking hub for many other RDF data sets in the Linked Open Data cloud on the Web of Data. Therefore, accessing the DBpedia data set is a common task for various Semantic Web applications. Given the fact that DBpedia is currently accessed through public SPARQL endpoints, which requires the users to know and understand the vocabularies of the DBpedia ontology and to master the complicated syntax and semantics for the SPARQL language. This is a tough task for the querying users, especially for lay-users without sufficient knowledge of Semantic Web techniques. The goal of this paper is to provide the users, especially lay-users, with a friendly, easy-to-use interface for querying the DBpedia dataset. Such a user interface can create a visual class hierarchy of the DBpedia ontology for the users to browse and let the users specify query conditions by means of simple form-based operations. We design a group of algorithms for the lay-user interface, implement a prototype, LUQI-DBpedia, of the interface, and use LUQI-DBpedia to carry out query experiments. The implementation and experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is achievable using Java programming language and Apache Jena framework for Java.