LinkDaViz - automatic binding of linked data to visualizations

As the Web of Data is growing steadily, the demand for user-friendly means for exploring, analyzing and visualizing Linked Data is also increasing. The key challenge for visualizing Linked Data consists in providing a clear overview of the data and supporting non-technical users in finding suitable visualizations while hiding technical details of Linked Data and visualization configuration. In order to accomplish this, we propose a largely automatic workflow which guides users through the process of creating visualizations by automatically categorizing and binding data to visualization parameters. The approach is based on a heuristic analysis of the structure of the input data and a comprehensive visualization model facilitating the automatic binding between data and visualization parameters. The resulting assignments are ranked and presented to the user. With LinkDaViz we provide a web-based implementation of the approach and demonstrate the feasibility by an extended user and performance evaluation.