Engineering Homework Help

In this assignment, you will engage with the knowledge generated from the collective work of the students in this course.  We have merged all of the individual knowledge graphs we received from Knowledge Graph Assignment 3 into a collective knowledge graph and prepared an interactive visualization of the data. In order to view the visualization, follow the steps below. If you get stuck, please be sure to watch the embedded video below, which provides step-by-step instructions about how to do it correctly.

Step 1: Connecting with the VPN

1. Connect to the school vpn

2. In your web browser, navigate to the link. (Note: this link will return “This site can’t be reached” if you aren’t logged in using the VPN.)

3. Log in using “ics5” for both the username and the password. You may have to click on “ICS5_Knowledge_Graph_Visualization”, if you are not already on the page shown in the screenshot below.

You should now be on a page that looks like this:

Step 2: Exploring the Graph Visualization

1. In the text box that says “Search RDF Resources”, start typing “Sustainability”, and a suggestion box will open suggesting “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability” as the first option. Select this option and then press the red button “Visual Graph” on the right hand side of the screen. This visualization will feature the Sustainability concept attached to 20 other concepts.

2. Now click the gear icon in the top right of the screen, and change “Maximum Links to Show” to be 1000, then click “Save” at the bottom. This will re-load the graph to show a much larger network and may take several seconds to load. (Note: If your computer is not able to handle 1000 nodes relatively smoothly, feel free to drop this number to 500, 200, or even 50 so you can explore the graph easily. Professor Tomlinson’s 2014 laptop can only display ~200 nodes easily.) Once you are able to view the network comfortably, take some time to explore the connections. See if you can find one that you contributed, and explore how your contribution fits into the larger network of knowledge.

3. Within the graph visualization, you can easily expand and collapse concepts. To expand a concept, simply double click on it to open all of the direct connections to that concept. To collapse a concept, hover your mouse over the concept. You should see several buttons appear on the right hand side of the concept. Select the top button that shows two arrows pointing outwards (where the yellow arrow is pointing in the image below). This will remove all of the direct connections to this concept from the visualization. You can also remove a concept from your visualization by Control-clicking it (Windows) or Command-clicking it (Mac).  Don’t worry; this will just remove the data from your visualization; you can still go find that node again if you want it.  (Note: as you get more nodes on the screen, you’ll see the graph slow down; feel free to collapse nodes that you’re not looking at any more to get it to go faster.)

 

4. You can zoom out to make sure that the whole visualization fits on your screen, or zoom in to see more granular details of the network.

5. After you’ve seen the large network centered around Sustainability, return to the home screen by clicking the large blue-and-orange button in the upper left that says “GraphDB”. Use the same search box as before (labeled “Search RDF Resources”) to start typing a concept that you’d like to visualize. Since only concepts included in KG3 submissions are present, you may have to try multiple concepts before finding one that is in the visualization. You can start with a concept that you included in your own KG3 submission, if you want to ensure that it will be present.

6. Once again, if the concept you are searching is present, you should see it automatically suggested in the menu that opens below the search box.  Select this option and then press the red button “Visual Graph” on the right hand side of the screen. As mentioned before, if you still have “Maximum Links to Show” set to 1000, the visualization may be overwhelming and/or slow, so feel free to play around with this setting as described in step 2. Setting this option to a low number such as 10 or 20 will make the graph more readable, but will also omit many connections.

To show that you have been able to view the visualization, please take a screenshot of the graph visualization with a set of interconnections that you find interesting (see example below) and submit it as part of this assignment.

 

The screenshot should include at least 25 nodes, and may include thousands. Since the network will be fairly complex, it’s ok if every concept label and relationship label is not totally visible in your screenshot; some may cover up others and that is fine. Screenshots can be in the following formats: .png, .jpg, or .gif.

If you’re unfamiliar with capturing and saving screenshots from your computer, please see the links below for instructions for both Windows and Mac.

Windows: Use Snipping Tool to capture screenshots (microsoft.com) (Links to an external site.)

Mac: Take a screenshot on your Mac – Apple Support (Links to an external site.)

Step 3: Writeup

For this part of the assignment, you will write 2 paragraphs, as specified below:

Paragraph 1: Write at least 100 words on what you observed when you visualized the large network of concepts around Sustainability. You might want to talk about specific connections that you found noteworthy, whether the visualization looked as you expected it to, whether there were any surprises as you explored the graph, and whether you feel the knowledge contained within the graph could be useful for future applications, educational or otherwise (and if so, what applications?).

Paragraph 2: Find a chain of exactly 5 concepts in the visualization that conveys a strong message related to sustainability, technology, or the intersection of the two. Write at least 100 words detailing the chain. First consider the entire chain and tell us why it stood out to you, and how it relates to the course. Then, for each of the 4 relationships in the chain, explain why you believe the relationship is true (or if you think it’s false, explain why as well). Citing sources isn’t required, but it could be helpful in supporting your argument.

Please make sure to also document your chain in the writeup, so we know what you are referring to. Make sure your documentation includes the directionality of each relationship. For example, using the coffee example shown in Knowledge Graph Assignment 1, I might document a 5 concept chain like this: 

Alertness <- opposes – Fatigue <- inhibits – Coffee – includes  -> Caffeine – studied by -> Chemistry