ExConQuer: Lowering barriers to RDF and Linked Data re-use

A major obstacle to the wider use of semantic technology is the perceived complexity of RDF data by stakeholders who are not familiar with the Linked Data paradigm, or are otherwise unaware of a dataset’s underlying schema. In order to help overcome this barrier, we propose the ExConQuer Framework (Explore, Convert, and Query Framework) as a set of tools that preserve the semantic richness of the data model while catering for simplified and workable views of the data. Through the available tools users are able to explore and query linked open datasets without requiring any knowledge of SPARQL or the datasets’ underlying schema. Moreover, executed queries are persisted so that they can be easily explored and re-used, and even edited. Therefore, with this framework we attempt to target the evident niche in existing tools that are intended to be used by non-experts to consume Linked Data to its full potential.