Interactive and iterative visual exploration of knowledge graphs based on shareable and reusable visual configurations

Knowledge graphs denote structured data which represent entities and relationships between them in a form of a graph, often expressed in the RDF data model. It may be hard for lay users to explore existing knowledge graphs, especially when graphs from different data sources need to be integrated. In this paper, we present an approach to knowledge graph visual exploration based on the concept of shareable and reusable visual configurations. A visual configuration comprises domain specific views on a knowledge graph which define operations such as node detail or expansion. These operations are easy to understand for lay users who can use them to explore a graph while complexities unnecessary in a given application context remain hidden. We introduce an ontology which enables to express and publish visual configurations and reuse their components in other configurations. We also provide an experimental implementation called KGBrowser. We evaluate the proposed approach with real users. We also compare our implementation KGBrowser with other existing tools for knowledge graph visualization and exploration. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.