Konduit VQB: a Visual Query Builder for SPARQL on the Social Semantic Desktop

With the adoption of Nepomuk as an organic part of KDE the semantic desktop became a reality to a great number of users and is employed by a growing number of applications. Thus, the amount of semantic data is constantly growing on the desktop. Therefore users need a way to access this data outside of the limiting use cases of the applications employing Nepomuk-KDE. We aim to assist users in building queries and running them to make use of RDF data that would otherwise be partially or completely hidden. In this paper, as an initial iteration of our efforts, we present four approaches to building SPARQL queries visually, based on two different categorizations: schema-based vs. instance-based and SELECT vs. CONSTRUCT queries. We present the used interfaces, visual languages and query generation methods associated to each of approaches as well as the autocompletion techniques for the instancebased query builders.