A Visualisation and Editing Tool for Semantic Data

Resource Description Framework (RDF) has proven to be a highly adaptable and straightforward data model for engineering science. RDF was originally developed to "build a vendor-neutral and operating system-independent system of metadata"[1]. Metadata plays a key role in Research Data Management (RDM), particularly within engineering disciplines. In this context, metadata must be described in a machine-readable format to enable automated processing and interoperability. Traditionally, formats like XML and JSON are used, but they lack the semantic depth that RDF, combined with ontologies, can provide. Implement technologies in a new context always comes with challenges. In our case, the lack of a user-friendly way to create and edit RDF files is a significant barrier. The existing tools often fall short, either lacking critical features or being too complex to use. For example, Gephi[2] is a general purpose tool for graphs visualisation, but it is not supporting RDF. isSemantic[3] is a semantic data testing tool, while offering RDF visualisation, but lacks editing features and visual clarity. Neo4j[4] and GraphDB[5] as industry solutions provider offer more advanced interfaces. The RDF-support of Neo4j is not easy to configure, and GraphDB's visualisation is inflexible and the software itself is not open source. To address these gaps, we are creating the RDF Editor [6], a tool which enables the visualisation, creation and editing of RDF files and data in a simple and user-friendly way, without the need of any setup requirements. The programming language we used for the implementation is Python, because it is simple, flexible and has RDF library (rdflib) and Qt-binding (PyQt6). We drew inspiration from Neo4j's interface and design our own logic to interact with the graphs. While designing the logic, we keep the intuitive feel of the tool in mind. On the other hand, we implemented a data model in python which is based on rdflib and PyQt6. The data model should ensure the robustness and adaptivity of RDF Editor. The software is licensed under MIT licence, so the data model is also reusable for other projects.