Open PHACTS Explorer Bringing the web to the semantic web Ian Dunlop 1 , Rishi Ramgolam 2 , Stephen Pettifer 1 , Alasdair JG Gray 3 , James Eales 4 , Carole Goble 1 , Jan Velterop 2 1 University of Manchester (ian.dunlop, steve.pettifer, carole.goble@manchester.ac.uk) 2 AQnowledge Ltd. (ramgolam, velterop@aqnowledge.com) 3 Heriot-Watt University (A.J.G.Gray@hw.ac.uk) 4 University of Leicester (jme25@leicester.ac.uk) Abstract. The Open PHACTS Explorer is a web application that supports drug discovery via the Open PHACTS API without requiring knowledge of SPARQL or the RDF data being searched. It provides a UI layer on top of the Open PHACTS linked data cache and also provides a javascript library to facili- tate easy access to the Open PHACTS API. 1.1 Introduction A common criticism of the semantic web and linked data is the lack of end-user tools available [1]. The Open PHACTS [2] project provides a linked data cache over a number of pharmacology datasets with access via an API rather than the more tradi- tional SPARQL endpoint. This enables novice linked data users to focus on finding data rather writing queries. The Explorer is a web application which serves both as a demonstrator of the API and a pharmacology discovery tool. It was influenced by the original Open PHACTS demonstrator system [3]. The Open PHACTS Explorer 1 has the look and feel of a modern web application and is driven by the familiar web paradigm of searching for results and clicking on hyper- links. The Explorer uses the Ember JS 2 Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework in conjunction with the Handlebars 3 web page template language. Handlebars is built on top of HTML which allows CSS to be used for styling. This reduces the learning curve for developers since they already have the core skills required. An EmberJS web application runs entirely within the users browser with a full MVC stack that reduces latency and the need for client/server round trips to fetch pages and data. Ruby on Rails 4 (RoR) is used to start the application and serve the static elements like 1 https://github.com/openphacts/explorer2 & http://jupiter.cs.man.ac.uk 2 http://emberjs.com/ 3 http://handlebarsjs.com/ 4 http://rubyonrails.org/