We begin with the observation that a typical SPARQL endpoint is not friendly in the eyes of an average user. Typical users of cultural databases include researchers in the humanities, museum professionals and the general public. Few of these people have any coding experience and few would feel comfortable translating their questions into a SPARQL query.

Moreover, the majority of the users expect searches of online collections to take something like the form of a regular Google search (names, a few words, or at the top end Boolean operators). This approach to search does not make use of the full potential of the graph-type databases that typically make SPARQL endpoints available. It simply does not occur to an average user to ask the database a query of the type “show me all book authors whose children or grandchildren were artists.”

The extensive possibilities that are offered by graph databases to researchers in the humanities go unexplored because of a lack of awareness of the possibilities they offer and a shortage of information about how they can be used. Even those academics who understand the potential of these resources and have some experience in using them, it is often difficult to get an overview of the semantics of complex datasets.

We therefore set out to develop a tool that:

• simplifies the entry point of a SPARQL query into a form that is accessible to any user
• makes it possible for users to explore the content of a graph database and the possibilities for querying it
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• List and link your actual and ideal data sources.

• Loïc Jaouen loic.jaouen@unil.ch
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