Exploring Linked Open Data with Tag Clouds

In this paper we present the contextual tag cloud system: a novel application that helps users explore a large scale RDF dataset. Unlike folksonomy tags used in most traditional tag clouds, the tags in our system are ontological terms (classes and properties), and a user can construct a context with a set of tags that defines a subset of instances. Then in the contextual tag cloud, the font size of each tag depends on the number of instances that are associated with that tag and all tags in the context. Each contextual tag cloud serves as a summary of the distribution of relevant data, and by changing the context, the user can quickly gain an understanding of patterns in the data. Furthermore, the user can choose to include RDFS taxonomic and/or domain/range entailment in the calculations of tag sizes, thereby understanding the impact of semantics on the data. The system runs on the BTC2012 dataset with more than 1.4 billion triples from which we extract over 380,000 tags. Several scalability challenges must be overcome in order to achieve a responsive interface.