Exploring the web of spatial data with facete

The majority of data (including data published on the Webas Linked Open Data) has a spatial dimension. However,the efficient, user friendly exploration of spatial data remainsa major challenge. We present Facete, a web-based explorationand visualization application enabling the spatialfacetedbrowsing of data with a spatial dimension. Faceteimplements a novel spatial data exploration paradigm basedon the following three key components: First, a domain independentfaceted filtering module, which operates directly onSPARQL and supports nested facets. Second, an algorithmthat efficiently detects spatial information related to thoseresources that satisfy the facet selection. The detected relationsare used for automatically presenting data on a map.And third, a workflow for making the map display interactwith data sources that contain large amounts of geometricinformation. We demonstrate Facete in large-scale, realworld application scenarios.