Ontology-driven Visual Exploration of Preclinical Research Data in the Spinal Cord Injury Domain.

We present SCIExplorer, an interactive web application for browsing research data represented in RDF format. Offering an intuitive exploration of the data in a visual interface based on the data-describing ontology, SCIExplorer is designed to overcome the potentially high entrance barriers faced by human domain experts interested in investigating research results at a glance without the need to formulate complex queries. In contrast, SCIExplorer provides filter-driven dynamic generation of SPARQL queries without the need to specify them manually. We demonstrate that the tool can be effectively used to answer relevant competency questions in the domain of spinal cord injury, thus providing intuitive access to the results of preclinical studies which are represented in RDF. In particular, SCIExplorer offers drill-downs to individual preclinical results in order to visualize their core parameters at an interpretable level of abstraction that is guided by an underlying domain ontology.