An assessment of the analytical benefits afforded by a timeline visualisation of Semantic Web data with temporal properties

Tredgold, J. (2008). An assessment of the analytical benefits afforded by a timeline visualisation of Semantic Web data with temporal properties. Student dissertation for The Open University module M801 MSc in Software Development Research Dissertation.

Please note that this student dissertation is made available in the format that it was submitted for examination, thus the author has not been able to correct errors and/or departures from academic standards in areas such as referencing.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00016073

Abstract

The vast amount of data on the World Wide Web is, for the most part, authored to be easy for humans to comprehend, rather than for machines to parse. This is good when humans want to read a page, but not so good when they want machines to search out information on their behalf, for instance, to find the best route and price for an upcoming trip. Activity characterised as the Semantic Web is attempting to create a web of structured data that can be utilised by network-based software applications. Data such as that found on Wikipedia is now available on that web. This project sought to evaluate some of the potential benefits of being able to build rich interactive applications to access and analyse data obtained from this new web. To do this a prototype timeline application was built backed with a subset of Semantic Web Wikipedia data. It was evaluated alongside traditional Wikipedia access, with results showing efficiency and accuracy gains. This suggests that, for a class of queries, the approach taken could provide a useful addition to the traditional routes of data discovery.

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