Visualizing WissKI Pathbuilders - Making Data Models Accessible using TIPSY

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship aim to ``act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings''. FAIR is an acronym that stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Linked Open Data is an orthogonal concept to FAIR meaning data both linked and open. Open means being available under an Open Source license. Linked means being linked to other data and placed into context. Linked Open Data is typically rated using a 5-star-scale encouraging the use of standards such as RDF. WissKI is a system which allows researchers to record data about objects of the cultural heritage in a triplestore backed by a formal ontology. A Triplestore is a special kind of graph database, representing graphs as RDF triples. WissKI is therefore ideal for producing 5-star FAIR linked and open data. Objects in WissKI are represented as a so-called entity. Entities have two representations: - An informal relational representation aimed at non-technical users. In an effectively tabular structure each object is part of one bundle, each bundle has a set of fields, and each object has values for each of the fields of its bundle. - A formal RDF-based representation based on OWL ontologies. This typically makes use of a project-specific CRMs such as CIDOC-CRM. Both models ultimately represent the same objects and WissKI aligns them by means of a so-called Pathbuilder. It is configurable via the WissKI interface and can be exported from WissKI systems by means of an XML file. Pathbuilders enable the WissKI system to work with any RDF-based model for data collection while at the same time remaining accessible to users. Essentially, WissKI end users work in the first representation while the system works in the second. In some situations -- e.g. when querying the graph for answering research questions -- users need to understand the mapping, but have difficulties from the tabular (editing-oriented) standard representation of the pathbuilder. This is what the TIPSY tool tries to solve. TIPSY - short for Tom's Inspector for Pathbuilders - is an inspector and visualizer for pathbuilders. It is implemented as a stand-alone web application that runs entirely client side in the users browser. TIPSY allows users to visualize the pathbuilder of any WissKI system. To this end the pathbuilder has to be loaded into TIPSY, using the XML export from above. It then generates a graph representation of the formal CRM being used by Pathbuilder, and displays how it is aligned with the informal model. This graph is then visualized using one of the supported graph visualization libraries, but can also be exported as an image file.