visually guided query generator

[satra]

it would be great if at some point we were able to allow people to generate queries by navigating the graph.

[vsoch]

I think I need an example to understand this better...you mean with a graphic like with neo4j?

[nicholsn]

not a great example but click on QBE here: http://dbpedia.org/isparql/

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 8:57 AM, Assenav Sochat [email protected]
wrote:

I think I need an example to understand this better...you mean with a
graphic like with neo4j
http://gist.neo4j.org/?github-vsoch%2Fnidm-neo4j%2F%2Fgist%2Fgraph.gist?

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#12 (comment)
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[vsoch]

I don't really understand what I'm supposed to do, it's not intuitive. I think people would want to be able to select some entity of choice, and then see the relationships that they could ask about. Seeing nodes and links with sparql syntax on them might be intuitive for semantic web folk, but not for common folk.

I'll think about this because I like the idea, and pretty much anything is possible with D3, but I'm not certain the most intuitive way to present the information.

[satra]

the general idea is to provide an intuitive visual interface for people to construct queries on graphs.

an example of this may entail:

1. attaching variables (what i want back) to nodes or edges of the graph
2. being able to point-click away from a variable to another node of interest
3. then asking the query to find all similar patterns

effectively it becomes a visual way to define a subgraph, and leverage the query language to translate that into finding information.

not all queries can be built this way, but it may provide a user an intuitive way of selecting the pieces of information they care about.

[vsoch]

I would use a neo4j database, which affords immediate visualization, integration into javascript (which means D3), and building really user friendly and useful tools. You could already do all of the points you describe above, and it would super easy to develop different python based applications for people to deploy with their graph database of interest.

[vsoch]

An important point is that there are many web developers actively interested and working with these databases. Neo4j is becoming flashy, cool, and bleeding edge in the same way as Docker is, and I predict that it's going to really take a hold of the "graph" database-verse.

[satra]

may be. while completely and temporarily leading this issue astray this short post is a good read (http://insideanalysis.com/2015/01/the-graph-database-and-the-rdf-database/).

[vsoch]

Thanks :)

[vsoch]

Ok, so if you want to have really great interactivity, assuming that you have the graph as a data structure in the browser (or some result of it from an internal query):

• Sigma.js: http://sigmajs.org/
• D3: you can do pretty much anything you can think of, examples:
  • http://bl.ocks.org/ericcoopey/6c602d7cb14b25c179a4
  • http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1095795
  • http://bl.ocks.org/rkirsling/5001347
  • http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1062288
  • http://bl.ocks.org/couchand/6420534

I usually start out with what I want to do in mind, and then just figure out how to build it.