Hide the Stack: Toward Usable Linked Data

The explosion in growth of the Web of Linked Data has provided, for the first time, a plethora of information in disparate locations, yet bound together by machine-readable, semantically typed relations. Utilisation of the Web of Data has been, until now, restricted to members of the community, eating their own dogfood, so to speak. To the regular web user browsing Facebook and watching Youtube, this utility is yet to be realised. The primary factor inhibiting such uptake is the usability of the Web of Data, which requires users to have prior knowledge of elements from the Semantic Web technology stack. We present a solution to this problem by hiding the stack, allowing end users to browse the Web of Data, explore and discover the information contained, and use Linked Data. Our solution employs a template-based visualisation approach where information attributed to a given resource is rendered according to its rdf:type.