Vinalod – Visualisation and navigation of linked open data
Publication Date/Time
2022-11-18T12:00:00+00:00
Discover the tool to visualise and navigate linked open data without
querying SPARQL
Open dissemination of public administration data is critical to ensure
the transparency and accountability of policy actions and to empower
citizens in democratic processes. While a large amount of European
Union data is available in textual format, the Publications Office of
the European Union has also made most of this structured data openly
available through semantic web technologies and links in graphs, using
linked open data (LOD)
[https://data.europa.eu/en/publications/datastories/linking-data-what-does-it-mean]. However,
for end users (and even for experts) LOD is still difficult to
navigate.

 

WHY LOD IS DIFFICULT TO EXPLORE

The main obstacles for exploring LOD include the need to have the
technical expertise for analysing RDF [https://www.w3.org/RDF/]
structured data, also by using RDF query language (SPARQL
[https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/]). But even for users who
master these skills, without a good knowledge of the specific data
model, or ontology used to describe the data assets, the exploration
often proves difficult. As a result, users have little knowledge of
the richness of EU data, because the existing web interfaces show very
few links between collections and non-official data (e.g. Wikidata
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page]). This prevents the
broader use of LOD.

To overcome this issue, the ‘Visualisation and navigation of linked
open data’ (Vinalod) tool offers a user-friendly and intuitive
exploration of visual data that allows the user to navigate directly
within knowledge graphs and therefore enables them to see the links
between collections.

 

TOOL FOR VISUALISATION AND NAVIGATION OF LOD

With the Vinalod tool, you can explore LOD without needing to be
familiar with SPARQL syntax, data models or ontologies of different
datasets. It allows you to explore this large amount of information
and quickly get an idea of what is important and significant. You can
also display the data in different ways and navigate between the
elements of the graphs.
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture2_1.png]
Vinalod covers the following data sources.

 	* EU VOCABULARIES. EU reference data can be explored via the Digital
Europa Thesaurus, the NUTS (nomenclature of territorial units for
statistics) classification and the Named Authority Lists controlled
vocabularies.
 	* EU WHOISWHO. The official directory of the EU can be explored via
the parent institution, through the internal section, leading to the
people working for each unit.
 	* EU DATA. Datasets and data visualisations published on
data.europa.eu – from national and EU open data catalogues – can
be explored by provenance and theme.
 	* EU PUBLICATIONS. Publications of EU institutions can be explored
by theme.
 	* EU LAW. Explore EU treaties and their classification.

 
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture3_0.png]
 

EXPLORING LINKS BETWEEN DATA

Vinalod then goes beyond exploring each individual data source to find
links between them. 

See how, for example, starting from the EU Whoiswho, we can explore
the keywords used in publications by a given EU institution.
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture5.png]
Vinalod provides a visualisation of the network of EU institutions to
help you understand the structure of the European Union and to further
explore its bodies. We can see how EU institutions are linked and
nested into each other. 
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture11.png]
Another feature of the EU Whoiswho is that it links members of
Parliament directly to their Wikipedia [https://www.wikipedia.org/]
pages and retrieves extra information. From there we can explore the
link between public sector data and that of a non-governmental
organisation.
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture8.png]
 

EXPLORING DATA ON DATA.EUROPA.EU

You can also use Vinalod to discover all the catalogues that publish
their data on data.europa.eu.
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture9.png]
See, for example, the datasets of the Luxembourg open data portal in
the snapshot below.  
[https://data.europa.eu/sites/default/files/img/media/Picture10.png]
The project was developed by a former EU Datathon
[http://op.europa.eu/eudatathon] participant in cooperation with many
Publications Office units. The BETA version of the tool is currently
available online at https://t-barrueco.github.io/vinalod/. In the
future, it will be integrated into data.europa.eu as a new way of
searching for information (in addition to manual search and SPARQL
search). 

If you’d like to know more about applications of linked open data by
the EU institutions, check out our ‘Linking data’ series of data
stories
[https://data.europa.eu/en/publications/datastories?keywords=&country=All&year=&sort_by=created&sort_order=DESC&items_per_page=10&keywords=%22Linking+data%3A+%22&merged-select=created&items_per_page=10].
