KGVQL: A knowledge graph visual query language with bidirectional transformations

Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs have been widely recognized as a critical component in many AI techniques and systems. A complex knowledge graph may contain hundreds of millions of nodes and edges, thus is challenging for end-users to understand and query. In this paper, we present a knowledge graph interactive visual query language, KGVQL, to improve the efficiency of end-users’ understanding and querying of knowledge graphs. Furthermore, KGVQL realizes the novel capability of flexible bidirectional transformations between query graphs and query results, therefore significantly assisting end-users in constructing queries over large and unfamiliar knowledge graphs in an incremental way. We present the visual syntax of KGVQL, discuss our design rationale behind this interactive visual query language, and illustrate a number of case studies. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of a visual query system based on KGVQL against a number of textual and visual query environments over a large knowledge graph, DBpedia. Our evaluation demonstrates the superiority of KGVQL in effectiveness and accuracy.