PathWays: entity-focused exploration of heterogeneous data graphs

Overview & Synopsis

Graphs, and notably RDF graphs, are a prominent way of sharing data. As data usage democratizes, users need help figuring out the useful content of a graph dataset. In particular, journalists with whom we collaborate [3] are interested in identifying, in a graph, the connections between entities, e.g., people, organizations, emails, etc. We propose PathWays, an interactive tool for exploring data graphs through their data paths connecting Named Entities (NEs, in short); each data path leads to a tabular-looking set of results. NEs are extracted from the data through dedicated Information Extraction modules. PathWays leverages the ConnectionLens platform [4,6] and follow-up work on dataset abstraction [5]. Its novelty lies in its interactive and efficient approach to enumerate, compute, and analyze NE paths.