Lens: A Faceted Browser for Research Networking Platforms

Research networking platforms, such as VIVO and Profiles Networking provide an information infrastructure for scholarship, representing information about research and researchers-their scholarly works, research interests, and organizational relationships. These platforms are open information infrastructures for scholarship, consisting of linked open data and open-source software tools for managing and visualizing scholarly information. Being RDF based, faceted browsing is a natural technique for navigating such data, partitioning the scholarly information space into orthogonal conceptual dimensions. However, this technique has so far been explored through limited queries in research networking platforms-not allowing for instance full graph based navigation on RDF data. In this paper we present Lens a client-side user interface for faceted navigation of scholarly RDF data. Lens is based on Exhibit, which is a lightweight structured data-publishing framework, but extends Exhibit for expressive SPARQL-like queries and scales it up for navigating amounts of RDF data. Lens consumes data in VIVO ontology, the de facto schema for researcher networking systems. We show how Lens provides better usability over current faceted browsers for research networking platforms.