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{{Paper
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<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1456/preface.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Preface
A picture is worth a thousand words, we often say, yet many areas are in demand of sophis-
ticated visualization techniques, and the Semantic Web is not an exception. The size and
complexity of ontologies and Linked Data in the Semantic Web constantly grow and the
diverse backgrounds of the users and application areas multiply at the same time. Provid-
ing users with visual representations and intuitive user interfaces can significantly aid the
understanding of the domains and knowledge represented by ontologies and Linked Data.
There is no one size fits all solution but different use cases demand different visualization
and interaction techniques. Ultimately, providing better user interfaces and visual repre-
sentations will foster user engagement and likely lead to higher quality results in different
applications employing ontologies and to the proliferation of Linked Data usage.

User interfaces are essential to easily provide access to the increasing diversity of knowl-
edge modeled in ontologies. As ontologies grow in size and complexity, the demand for
comprehensive visualization and sophisticated interaction also rises. In particular, user
interfaces are an integral part of ontology engineering, to help bridge the gap between
domain experts and ontology engineers. Ontology visualization is not a new topic and a
number of approaches have become available in recent years, with some being already
well-established, particularly in the field of ontology modeling. In other areas of ontology
engineering, such as ontology alignment and debugging, although several tools have re-
cently been developed, few provide a graphical user interface, not to mention navigational
aids or comprehensive visualization techniques.

While ontology users usually possess domain and/or knowledge representation expertise,
this is not necessarily the case with potential Linked Data consumers who can come
from very different backgrounds and have varying levels of expertise. Currently, the main
Linked Data consumers are technology experienced users, one of the reasons being the
lack of appropriate user interfaces and visualizations to support other user groups. Visual
approaches are needed to assist various kinds of users, who pursue diverse goals and pose
individual requirements.

In the presence of a huge network of interconnected resources, one of the challenges faced
by the Linked Data community is the visualization of the multidimensional datasets to
provide for efficient overview, exploration and querying tasks, to mention just a few. With
the focus shifting from a Web of Documents to a Web of Data, changes in the interaction
paradigms are in demand as well. Novel approaches also need to take into consideration
the technological challenges and opportunities given by new interaction contexts, ranging
from mobile and touch interaction to visualizations on large displays, and encompassing
highly responsive web applications.

The VOILA! workshop addressed these and related issues in its call for papers and at-
tracted 18 submissions in different paper categories. Three reviewers were assigned to
each submission. Based on their reviews we selected 12 contributions for presentation at
the workshop in the following categories: full research papers (5), position papers (2) and
short papers (5).

The first edition of VOILA! is co-located with the 14th International Semantic Web Con-
ference (ISWC 2015) and will take place as a full day event on October 11, 2015 in Beth-
lehem, Pennsylvania, USA. It will be organized around paper presentations and discus-
sions and will be accompanied by interactive software demonstrations, giving developers
a chance to gather feedback from the community.

We thank all authors for their submissions and all members of the VOILA! program com-
mittee for their useful reviews and comments. We are grateful to Miriam Fernandez and
Krzysztof Janowicz, the ISWC workshop chairs, for their continuous support during the
workshop organization. The workshop would not be possible without all of you!




September 2015                                                          Valentina Ivanova,
                                                                         Patrick Lambrix,
                                                                        Steffen Lohmann,
                                                                            Catia Pesquita




VOILA! 2015
http://voila2015.visualdataweb.org

</pre>