Data view

Introduction

The Data view page is accessed after clicking on a dataset name in the Datasets page. The Data page is composed of two main areas: the structure on the left, and the resource view on the right.

The Data Structure View

The left section of the data view page is dedicated to the data structures. This is a panel containing tabs with tree or list structures. The available tabs, that might differ according the data model adopted in the dataset (RDFS, OWL, SKOS or Ontolex), are:

Class: contains a panel showing the rdfs and owl:Classes of the dataset hierarchically structured (available only in RDFS and OWL datasets).
Concept: contains a panel showing the skos:Concepts of the dataset (hierarchically structured or as a plain list, based on the selected visualization mode), eventually filtered according the selected active schemes (available in SKOS and Ontolex datasets).
Collection: contains a panel with the skos:Collections of the dataset (available only in SKOS datasets).
Scheme: contains a panel with the skos:ConceptSchemes of the dataset (available in SKOS and Ontolex datasets).
Property: contains a panel with the properties tree.
Lexicon: contains a panel with the list of the lime:Lexicons (available only in Ontolex datasets).
LexEntry: contains a panel with the ontolex:LexicalEntry in the active lexicon (available only in Ontolex datasets).
Alignments: this is a "special" tab. It contains a list of alignmed datasets with the current one. Further details can be found in the dedicated page.

At the bottom of every structure panel (so, except for Alignments) there is a search bar that will be described later.

All structure areas in the Data View have some buttons in common (upper-right part).

The Sort Button changes the sorting of the resources: available sorting criteria are by URI or by Rendering.

The Rendering Button activates the rendering for the resources shown in the structure.

The Refresh Button allows the user to refresh the view on the structure.

A further gear button is present in the Concept and LexEntry panel and allows to edit the settings of the specific structure. Currently, the only one available is for the visualization mode of the resources.

Above these three buttons, on the same row of the tab selectors, the button opens a languages setting dialog.

From this dialog user can set the languages for rendering the resources. The defined languages can be sorted by name, code or the rendering order ("position" column). The "active" column determines which languages have been selected for being shown. Administrator user can provide a default languages setting for a dataset (see here), in this case, if user doesn't activate any language, the default setting will be applied.

KOS View

When a SKOS dataset is accessed, the main tab is the Concept one. As previously stated, it provides a hierarchical view of the skos:Concepts of the dataset (an example is already shown in the first screenshot of this page).

An alternative visualization mode can be set from the Concept tree settings modal.

From here user can switch between Hierarchy based and Search based mode. Additionally, if Hierarchy based is chosen it is possible to set a limitation to the maximum amount of top concepts visible in the tree. This last setting is useful for preventing the initialization of a tree with too much top concepts which may cause performance issues.
Note: administrator user can restrict/force the visualization mode so that visitor users cannot change it. For example he may set the usage of the search mode and prevent visitor users from switching to hierarchical mode (see here).

When the Search based mode is activated, the Concept panel is empty (it will not show the usual concept tree) and it allows users to reach a desired concept only by means the search feature.

Ontology View

ShowVoc provides also a basic view for exploring RDFS or OWL ontologies

The Class panel is splitted in two vertical sections: the top one shows the class tree, while the bottom one eventually shows the instances of the selected class.

The visualization of the class tree can be slightly customized clicking on the "gear" button on the top-right corner of the panel.

From the settings dialog users can:

choose the root class of the tree (by default the class tree is rooted on owl:Thing).
customize the tree by filtering some classes: it is possible to exclude a specific class from the tree. For instance by default, some imported classes like owl:NamedIndividual or owl:Nothing are hidden). In order to be effective, the filter must be enabled through the "funnel" switch.
enable or disable the visualization of classes instance number. When enabled a numeric badge, shown next to the class name, informs the amount of instances of such class.

Lexicon View

The lexicon view is available for Ontolex projects. In this view the relevant tabs are Lexicon, which just allows the selection of a lime:Lexicon, and LexEntry which offers a list-view of ontolex:LexicalEntry, defined in such lexicon, subdivided alphabetically. A dropdown menu between the toolbar and the list allows switching to a different letter of the alphabet.

The subdivision of the lexical entries by first letter (or first and second in case of 2-char index) is similar to the organization of alphabetically indexed printed dictionaries. It should help the user navigate a potentially long list of lexical entries. Additionally, the user can find a lexical entry through the search field on the bottom of the structure: the selection of a result causes the automatic switch to the right letter of the alphabet.

The alphabetic indexing is also meant to reduce the number of lexical entries that should be retrieved and then displayed in the UI: this optimization can be very important when working with large lexicons. In some circumstances, a single alphabetic index may not sufficient, because the number of matching entries is too high. The gear button above the list can be clicked to reveal a dialog that allows to customize the view.

In particular, it is possible to switch between the Index based and the Search based visualization modes. The former is enabled by default, and it can be configured by choosing between using just one or two letters as index. A longer index has be shown to be adequate for browsing very large lexicons such as the Open Multilingual Wordnet. The "search based" visualization mode offers an alternative in which the list is only populated with the results of a search.

A mechanism for preventing the initialization of too much element has been provided. Through the Lexical entries limitation is indeed possible to warn the user when its index selection is not so restrictive and the amount of lexical entries retrieved could lead to performance issues. In case of such limit is exceeded, the list initialization is blocked and a warning message appears in the panel suggesting possible solutions.

Alignment View

In the Alignment tab it is possible to see the datasets for which exist semantic relations with the resources of the current one.

Every element of the list is rendered by a user-friendly dataset name (in case the related dataset is hosted and profiled in ShowVoc) or by a URI space. On the right of them a number tells the amount of linksets available for that dataset, namely the amount of resources defined in the current dataset that are mapped (linked through a semantic relation) to resources defined in that target dataset. For example, looking at the image above, we can tell that Gemet has 1199 resources related to Agrovoc resources, 1938 with Eurovoc resources and so on. The elements of the list can be in turn expanded in order to see their alignments.

Note: due to a current limitation, it is not possible to know a-priori if a dataset has in turn alignments with other datasets. So, each dataset is rendered as “expandable”, namely with a triangle on its left. Only after it is expanded, in case no alignment is found, it will be rendered as no expandable and the triangle disappears.

When a dataset is selected a panel opens on the right of the Alignments tab where the actual alignments are shown. More details about this panel can be found in the dedicated page.

The Resource View

The ResourceView is a general widget for showing the details of different kind of resources. Everytime a resource is clicked in the left structure view, its ResourceView is open in the active tab on the right. You can open a ResourceView on a new tab by pressing ctrl key (or command on MacOs) when clicking on the resource in the structure.

Even the resources that appears as values in a ResourceView can be in turn inspected simply by double-clicking it over, contextually it is focused in the structure view. If the value resource is not reachable in any tree or list its ResourceView will be open in a modal dialog as in the figure below.

At the top of the ResourceView there is a bar with three buttons: the button with the eye allows to enable or disable the inferred information; the button with the capital A enables/disables the rendering; the one with the cog icon allows to edit the ResourceView settings. Next to these three buttons there is an arrow that expands a menu. From here it is possible to show the current resource in a graph view that will be described later.

In the ResourceView settings dialog it is possible to apply several customizations to the view.

Users can customize the way clickable values (resources that can be described in turn) are shown. For example, they can be shown using a dedicated widget with an icons/flags on the left, or using a custom color, or again the text style can be set to bold or/and underlined. The following image show an example of custom style

The Show datatype badge option indicates whether typed literals should be accompanied by a badge that explicitly states the datatype. The image below shows the same date with the option disabled/enabled.

Within the Value-filter Languages panel, it is possible to select the languages that will be shown when filtering literal values in resource descriptions. For instance, if the user wants to see just the english labels of a resource, it is enough to check only the en language and activate the filter through the switch in the top right corner.

From the Section filter panel is possible to show or hide entire partitions of the ResourceView in order to make it more readable if the user is not interested in some of them. The panel is splitted in two sub-panel. The left one lists all the available resource types (e.g. Concept, Class, ...), for each of them is possible to check/uncheck a specific partition in order to show/hide it from the view. The Partitions panel provides also quick actions. From the header buttons is possible to check/uncheck all the partitions or to make visible or hiding the a specific one for all the resource types.

By default, the ResourceView does not explicitly show section divisions. Therefore, it's possible to make them explicit through the "Show section header" option. Once enabled, this option ensures that section names with dividers are visible in the ResourceView.

Search

Navigation in tree and list panels is supported by a search bar for finding resources in the dataset.

The Search Bar

The search bar provides three different search modes

Standard search: a "simple" search that looks for a prompted string
Advanced search: a more powerful search which allows to apply filters
Custom search: a search based on parameterized SPARQL queries

The standard search is the default search fired when the "lens" symbol is clicked or the ENTER key is pressed during the typing into the search bar input field.

Besides the search button, a quick option button allows to choose the strategy for search, among:

Starts with: looks for resource having at least a lexicalization starting with the prompted string
Contains: looks for resource having at least a lexicalization containing the prompted string
Ends with: looks for resource having at least a lexicalization ending with the prompted string
Exact: looks for resource having an exact match with the prompted string
Fuzzy: looks for resource having an approximate match with the prompted string

The gear button on the Search bar opens a further set of options:

The following options are available:

The first option (String match mode) is related again to the search strategy, also available as a quick option on the bar.
Search mode: if the search (normally acting on lexicalizations only) should be extended to look into the whole URI, the local name of the resource and evental notes.
Concept search (available only in concept panel): through an option contained in this section it is possible to constrain the search to only the currently active skos:ConceptScheme(s).

Advanced Search

The advanced search is a powerful search tool that allows to search resources in the dataset with the support of a set of more complex filters than the ones of the standard search. Unlike the standard, this search looks for any resource in the dataset, so it is not constrained to the kind of resource shown by the panel where the search is executed/invoked.

It foreseen the following filters:

Search string: it is optional, if provided, similarly to the standard search, this string is used to search a resource according the criteria specified in the Search mode section.
Status: allows to search resources by status. Available statuses are Anything, Not deprecated and Only deprecated.
Search mode: see the description in the previous section.
Lexicalization: see the description in the previous section.
Types: if provided, filters the results to the resources belonging to the given class. Multiple classes are evaluated in AND
Schemes: similarly to the Types, filters the results to the resources belonging to the given scheme (only in projects where the concept tree is available). Multiple schemes are evaluated in AND.
Ingoing links: filters the results according to subject-predicate pairs. Multiple pairs are evaluated in AND, multiple subjects in OR.
Outgoing links: filters the results according to predicate-object pairs. Multiple pairs are evaluated in AND, multiple objects in OR. The object could be a set of values, or a plain literal that is in turn retrieved through a free-text search.

Custom Search

The custom search exploits the power of SPARQL to execute customizable search. A custom search can be instantiated selecting a previously stored parameterized query which must return a single variable (if not, an error will be displayed when running the search).

The UI shows a form composed by as many input fields as parameters defined by the parameterized query. Each input field guides the user to enter a value that is compliant with the constraints defined by the related parameterized SPARQL query. For instance, in the example shown in the following figure, the Type field suggests to enter a class, Label Pred. a property and Label a string or a plain literal.
Enabling the details (by clicking on the Details button in the top right corner) the UI shows the varible names (instead of a display name) beside each fields and also the SPARQL query related to the custom search.

Graph View

In addition to the Data Structure Views (trees, lists and ResourceView), it is possible to explore the data through the Graph View.
ShowVoc provides three kinds of Graph View:

Data-oriented: it is a close representation of the RDF graph, with nodes representing resources and edges representing properties.
Model-oriented: it is oriented to the relations that describe the ontology model, like the relations between the domain and range classes of a property.
Class-diagram: an UML-like class-diagram that describes relations between classes and their properties.

For further details, see the dedicated page.