Exploring the web of spatial data with facete

Claus Stadler, Michael Martin, Sören Auer

Abstract: The majority of data (including data published on the Web as Linked Open Data) has a spatial dimension. However, the efficient, user friendly exploration of spatial data remains a major challenge. We present Facete, a web-based exploration and visualization application enabling the spatial-faceted browsing of data with a spatial dimension. Facete implements a novel spatial data exploration paradigm based on the following three key components: First, a domain independent faceted filtering module, which operates directly on SPARQL and supports nested facets. Second, an algorithm that efficiently detects spatial information related to those resources that satisfy the facet selection. The detected relations are used for automatically presenting data on a map. And third, a workflow for making the map display interact with data sources that contain large amounts of geometric information. We demonstrate Facete in large-scale, real world application scenarios.