Path Outlines: Browsing Path-Based Summaries of Knowledge Graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces Path Outlines, a visualization tool for browsing path-based summaries of knowledge graphs, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy over existing methods through novel visualizations and user evaluation.

Contribution

It presents Path Outlines, a new tool with visualizations for exploring knowledge graph paths, validated by user studies showing enhanced performance and usability.

Findings

Path Outlines is 3 times faster than baseline techniques.

Participants made fewer errors using Path Outlines.

Users found Path Outlines easier and preferred it for task completion.

Abstract

Knowledge Graphs have become a ubiquitous technology powering search engines, recommender systems, connected objects, corporate knowledge management and Open Data. They rely on small units of information named triples that can be combined to form higher level statements across datasets following information needs. But data producers face a problem: reconstituting chains of triples has a high cognitive cost, which hinders them from gaining meaningful overviews of their own datasets. We introduce path outlines: conceptual objects characterizing sequences of triples with descriptive statistics. We interview 11 data producers to evaluate their interest. We present Path Outlines, a tool to browse path-based summaries, based on coordinated views with 2 novel visualisations. We compare Path Outlines with the current baseline technique in an experiment with 36 participants. We show that it is 3 times faster, leads to better task completion, less errors, that participants prefer it, and find tasks easier with it.