Facilitating Entity Navigation Through Top-K Link Patterns

Entity navigation over Linked Data often follows semantic links by using Linked Data browsers. With the increasing volume of Linked Data, the rich and diverse links make it difficult for users to traverse the link graph and find target entities. Besides, there is a necessity for navigation paradigm to take into account not only single-entity-oriented transition, but also entity-set-oriented transition. To facilitate entity navigation, we propose a novel concept called link pattern, and introduce link pattern lattice to organize semantic links when browsing an entity or a set of entities. Furthermore, to help users quickly find target entities, top-K link patterns are selected for entity navigation. The proposed approach is implemented in a prototype system and then compared with two Linked Data browsers via a user study. Experimental results show that our approach is effective.