As an inaugural "Tips and Tricks" post, I wanted to share an easy way to start exploring your knowledge graph using two existing features of Stardog Studio: Search and Visualization.
Suppose I've got a music dataset with a good amount of data in it (e.g., the music dataset used in our SPARQL tutorial), and I want to start exploring things related to The Beatles. By clicking on the search icon in Studio's control bar, typing “beatles” into the search box, and hitting Enter, I can get a number of Beatles-related results:
Let's explore these results.
One thing I notice while scrolling through them is a producer named “Danger Mouse.” Since I'm surprised to learn that there's a connection between someone with that name and The Beatles — the "description" field of the search results tells me that Danger Mouse released an album that used instrumentals from The Beatles’ “White Album” — I want to explore what other connections there might be. It's here that the visualization features of Studio are really useful. I can select “Danger Mouse” in the results table, click “Visualize,” and immediately see a small graph of the “neighborhood” around him:
Hmm… Using this visualization, I can now see that Danger Mouse also produced a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. That means The Beatles and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are connected through Danger Mouse.
Intrigued, I want to keep exploring what other connections through Danger Mouse might exist in my graph. To do that, I can right-click the node for the Chili Peppers album and choose "Expand from node.” After doing that a few times, I end up going from the Chili Peppers to someone named “Freaky Styley,” and then from Freaky Styley to George Clinton. Just like that, I've hopped through my knowledge graph to learn that George Clinton and The Beatles are connected through (among other pathways) a producer named “Danger Mouse!”
This is a cool way to use Studio, combining its Search and Visualization capabilities, to quickly start exploring your data and the connections hidden within it. Try loading the music data into Stardog Studio yourself and seeing what other connections you can find!