OptiqueVQS

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013

Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for the potential of value creation processes such as sense-making, decision making, and intelligence analysis. As such, providing friendly data access tools that directly engage domain experts (i.e., end-users) with data, as opposed to the situations where database/IT experts are required to extract data from databases, could substantially increase competitiveness and profitability. However, the ever increasing volume, complexity, velocity, and variety of data, known as the Big Data phenomenon, renders the end-user data access problem even more challenging. Optique, an ongoing European project with a strong industrial perspective, aims to countervail the Big Data effect, and to enable scalable end-user data access to traditional relational databases by using an ontology-based approach. In this paper, we specifically present the preliminary design and development of our ontology-based visual query system and discuss directions for addressing the Big Data effect.

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users' technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users' understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world's enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity – known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems.

Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for value creation processes, such as sense making, decision making, and intelligence analysis. Particularly, in an enterprise setting, intuitive data access tools that directly engage domain experts with data could substantially increase competitiveness and profitability. In this respect, the use of ontologies as a natural communication medium between end users and computers has emerged as a prominent approach. To this end, this article introduces a novel ontology-based visual query system, named OptiqueVQS, for end users. OptiqueVQS is built on a powerful and scalable data access platform and has a user-centric design supported by a widget-based flexible and extensible architecture allowing multiple coordinated representation and interaction paradigms to be employed. The results of a usability experiment performed with non-expert users suggest that OptiqueVQS provides a decent level of expressivity and high usability, and hence is quite promising. Keywords Visual query formulation · visual query systems · ontology-based data access · data retrieval

2014

Despite the dramatic growth of data accumulated by enterprises, obtaining value out of it is extremely challenging. In particular, the data access bottleneck prevents domain experts from getting the right piece of data within a constrained time frame. The Optique Platform unlocks the access to Big Data by providing end users support for directly formulating their information needs through an intuitive visual query interface. The submitted query is then transformed into highly optimized queries over the data sources, which may include streaming data, and exploiting massive parallelism in the backend whenever possible. The Optique Platform thus responds to one major challenge posed by Big Data in data-intensive industrial settings. Keywords—8.II.VIII.VI Knowledge management applications, 8.II.IV.IV Distributed databases, 8.V.II.VI Graphical user interfaces, 8.II.IV.VIII Query processing, 8.II.IV.XIII Temporal databases

2019

We demonstrate the interactive ViziQuer environment for composing rich visual queries (including aggregation, nesting and data expressions) over SPARQL endpoints. We describe the interactive means for building the visual constructs of the query language and discuss the user study results on the query environment usability. The ViziQuer tool environment is publicly available and open source.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2014

Grounded on real industrial use cases, we recently proposed an ontology-based visual query system for SPARQL, named OptiqueVQS. Ontology-based visual query systems employ ontologies and visual representations to depict the domain of interest and queries, and are promising to enable end users without any technical background to access data on their own. However, even with considerably small ontologies, the number of ontology elements to choose from increases drastically, and hence hinders usability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method using the log of past queries for ranking and suggesting query extensions as a user types a query, and identify emerging issues to be addressed.

Computer, 2015

Despite the dramatic growth of data accumulated by enterprises, obtaining value out of it is extremely challenging. In particular, the data access bottleneck prevents domain experts from getting the right piece of data within a constrained time frame. The Optique Platform unlocks the access to Big Data by providing end users support for directly formulating their information needs through an intuitive visual query interface. The submitted query is then transformed into highly optimized queries over the data sources, which may include streaming data, and exploiting massive parallelism in the backend whenever possible. The Optique Platform thus responds to one major challenge posed by Big Data in data-intensive industrial settings.

2016

Visual query interfaces make it easy for scientists and other nonexpert users to query a data collection. Heretofore, visual query interfaces have been statically-constructed, independent of the data. In this paper we outline a vision of a different kind of interface, one that is built (in part) from the data. In our data-driven approach, the visual interface is dynamically constructed and maintained. A data-driven approach has many benefits such as reducing the cost in constructing and maintaining an interface, superior support for query formulation, and increased portability of the interface. We focus on graph databases, but our approach is applicable to several other kinds of databases such as JSON and XML.

2013

The Optique project aims at developing an end-to-end system for semantic data access to Big Data in industries such as Statoil ASA and Siemens AG. In our demonstration we present the first version of the Optique system customised for the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate's FactPages, a publicly available dataset relevant for engineers at Statoil ASA. The system provides different options, including visual, to formulate queries over ontologies and to display query answers. Optique 1.0 offers installation wizards that allow to extract ontologies from relational schemata, extract and define mappings connecting ontologies and schemata, and align and approximate ontologies. Moreover, the system offers highly optimised techniques for query answering.

2011

The free-form nature of triplestores offers a lot of flexibility for constructing databases, but that freedom can also make it less obvious how to find arbitrary data for retrieval, errorchecking, or general browsing. Gruff is a graphical triplestore browser that attempts to make data retrieval more pleasant and powerful with a variety of tools for laying out cyclical graphs, displaying tables of properties, managing queries, and building SPARQL and queries as visual diagrams. Author Keywords