SWARMS: A New Tool for Domain Exploration in Semantic Web

This paper is concerned with 'domain exploration'. By domain exploration, we mean searching for data on a specific domain which has been modeled by ontology. We have found that exploration needs on a domain can be categorized into data search and navigation, through an analysis of survey results. In our approach, the domain data is organized as instances of domain concepts. The instances are indexed and data search is conducted by index-based search which is also known the keyword based search. In data navigation, users can select an instance in the result of the index based search to display in visualization view. In visualization view, we use graph to visualize the instance and its context. By instance's context, we mean that other instances which has relations between the selected one. Users can click a node in the graph to navigate to its visualization view. In visualization view, we provide constraint-based search, users can input properties' values to search for instances that has the input value in the certain properties. Other than index-based search, we provide association search for any two instances. By association of two instances, we mean that the possible direct relations and indirect relations between the two instances. In this paper, we will describe SWARMS' architecture, component technologies and its performance in FOAF domain, because FOAF(Friend-Of-A-Friend) [1] domain's data size is largest among the three domains. The FOAF domain contains more than 90,000 persons and more than 100,000 publications of the people in the domain.