VisiNav is a system to search and navigate web data, collected from a multitude of sources. In summary, the system demonstrates how to combine data from multiple sources into a single unified view, how to search and navigate the aggregated dataset, and how to re-use query results from web data in external applications.
On a conceptual level, VisiNav deals with objects. Objects can have attributes and links to other objects. For example, there are objects of type Person. A Person has a name; a Person knows another Person; a Person makes Documents; a Person is based near a Location.
Some of the funcationality of VisiNav can nowadays be found in Google's KnowledgeGraph and Facebook's Graph Search.
The dataset in the online system has been collected from the web (view top 99 sources - requires SVG-capable browser). The combined dataset contains more or less arbitrary data (some of which is social networking data) and doesn't follow a fixed schema.
Now, the system allows for
You can visualise query results in a table, graph, map, or timeline view.
The following video demonstrates the capabilities of the system.
Andreas Harth. "VisiNav: A system for visual search and navigation on web data". Journal of Web Semantics, Volume 8, Issue 4, November 2010, Pages 348-354 (ScienceDirect).
Andreas Harth. "Interactive Exploration of Web Datasets with VisiNav". Semantic Web Challenge, International Semantic Web Conference 2009, Washington DC.
Andreas Harth. "VisiNav: Visual Web Data Search and Navigation". 20th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, Linz, Austria, 31 August - 4 September 2009.