FaRBIE: A Faceted Reactive Browsing Interface for Multi RDF Knowledge Graph Exploration

Linked Data brings numerous RDF Knowledge Graphs to the Web, and as a result, the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud comprises several independent – but linked – graph datasets. Faceted Browsing is a popular type of User Interface (UI) to explore the knowledge in these RDF graphs. Due to the distributed and linked nature of RDF graphs, exploring more than one graph at a time is a common interaction scenario in this context. However, most state-of-the-art user interfaces allow users to browse only one RDF graph at a time. Additionally, exploring multiple RDF graphs adds a degree of uncertainty to the user interface, such as connectivity problems and longer query response times as well as variations in the size and semantic complexity of the retrieved data. In this paper, we present a faceted browsing approach named FaRBIE, which enables users to explore multiple RDF knowledge graphs simultaneously. The reactive UI approach implemented in FaRBIE aims to ‘react’ to the uncertainty imposed by querying multiple RDF graphs in order to enhance the user experience. FaRBIE is composed of reactive UI components, refined from common faceted browsing UIs and improved by means of reactive design patterns. A component-based UI approach supports the convenient generation and reuse of the reactive elements.