Visual Query Formulation for Linked Open Data: The Norwegian Entity Registry Case Simen Heggestøyl Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo Martin Giese Abstract The cloud of Linked Open Data is steadily growing, yet it remains largely inaccessible to the general public, due to the technical barrier posed by the requirement to know a formal query language such as SPARQL. In this article, we present a new approach for visual query formulation toward arbitrary SPARQL endpoints, and we show a working prototype developed to improve the accessibility to Linked Open Data sources for non-computer experts. We show how the prototype can be employed to simplify access to governmental Linked Open Data with a case study from the Norwegian Entity Registry. 1 Introduction Imagine the following situation: a journalist is in the process of writing an article about tiny, but successful, fishing businesses in Norway. For his research, he would like to know the answer to the following question: Which Norwegian fishing companies have ever had a yearly revenue of more than 100,000,000 (one hundred million) Norwegian kroner, but no more than 10 employees? To obtain this information, our journalist has some options: 1. He may go ahead and do some research. After a few basic web searches, it seems that the answer to this question is not readily available on the web. For instance, a web search at Google with the query string “small fishing companies in Norway” turns up a list of fishing companies in Norway, but information on their size or revenue is lacking. The journalist will have to look up this additional information from other sources, and manually filter out the companies that don’t fit the problem description. Unfortunately, this is a very demanding and time consuming task. Furthermore, such manual information gathering is prone to errors and incomplete results, especially if he doesn’t find any authoritative information sources. That is, how can he be sure that the list of fishing companies he found through Google is complete? This paper was presented at the NIK-2014 conference; see .