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MATVIZ: a semantic query and visualization approach for metallic materials data

Xiaoming Zhang (School of Information Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang, China)
Huilin Chen (School of Information Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang, China)
Yanqin Ruan (Department of Mechanical and Information Technology, Dali Vocational College of Agriculture and Forestry, Dali, China)
Dongyu Pan (School of Information Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Science and Technology, Shijiazhuang, China)
Chongchong Zhao (University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China)

International Journal of Web Information Systems

ISSN: 1744-0084

Article publication date: 21 August 2017

652

Abstract

Purpose

With the rapid development of materials informatics and the Semantic Web, the semantic-driven solution has emerged to improve traditional query technology, which is hard to discover implicit knowledge from materials data. However, it is a nontrivial thing for materials scientists to construct a semantic query, and the query results are usually presented in RDF/XML format which is not convenient for users to understand. This paper aims to propose an approach to construct semantic query and visualize the query results for metallic materials domain.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors design a query builder to generate SPARQL query statements automatically based on domain ontology and query conditions inputted by users. Moreover, a semantic visualization model is defined based on the materials science tetrahedron to support the visualization of query results in an intuitive, dynamic and interactive way.

Findings

Based on the Semantic Web technology, the authors design an automatic semantic query builder to help domain experts write the normative semantic query statements quickly and simply, as well as a prototype (named MatViz) is developed to visually show query results, which could help experts discover implicit knowledge from materials data. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed system in this paper can rapidly and effectively return visualized query results over the metallic materials data set.

Originality/value

This paper mainly discusses an approach to support semantic query and visualization of metallic materials data. The implementation of MatViz will be a meaningful work for the research of metal materials data integration.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51271033), Natural Science Foundation of Hebei (Grant No. F2013208107), Hebei Science and Technology Support Program (No. 16210312D) and Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Education Department (No. QN2015207).

Citation

Zhang, X., Chen, H., Ruan, Y., Pan, D. and Zhao, C. (2017), "MATVIZ: a semantic query and visualization approach for metallic materials data", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 260-280. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-11-2016-0065

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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