Review Comment:
Evaluation in brief:
(1) "Quality, importance, and impact of the described tool or system" very high / good
(2) "Clarity, illustration, and readability of the describing paper" poor / needs major revision
The paper describes a framework, called SAMPO-UI, for developing user interfaces for semantic portals.
The contents of the paper are a list of requirements for building effective semantic user interfaces, the description of the Sampo-UI framework for developing user interfaces for semantic portals, and a real case application of the Sampo-UI.
The paper is quite well organized, and well written. The paper fits the scope of the journal.
The general impression is that the work behind the paper, i.e. the creation and release of the framework was long and complex, and the framework is an important contribution to the Semantic Web Community. Unfortunately, the paper does not describe appropriately this framework. The description could be largely improved.
The paper presents some strong points:
- the framework has been built and refined over the knowledge acquired during the deployment of numerous Linked Data applications, it relies on a robust model (the "Sampo model") over which several semantic portals have been defined since 2002
- the framework is open source and is maintained constantly since 2018, moreover the documentation on Github is rich and clear and denotes the maturity of the tool.
On the other hand, the paper presents some weak points that need to be addressed:
- there is a lot of confusion around some concepts that are often used in the paper: Sampo UI framework, Sampo model, Sampo portal, Sampo series, Sampo UI. It is not always clear when they are synonyms or not.
Have all the "Sampo" portals been built by using the Sampo UI framework?
Is the "Sampo series" a collection of semantic portals based on the Sampo model?
- it is a bit strange to read like the first sentence that "This paper presents a new software framework", while when accessing the Git folder, the framework is available since Apr 16, 2018
- the description of the framework is incomplete and not careful: the client-server architecture has been well explained but the visual components of the framework need to be described in detail. Section 4.3 is inadequate.
- the paper is not balanced, the real case application (section 5) has been described with more details than the framework itself, and this mismatches with the title of the paper.
I suggest a deeper presentation of the framework and components that can be instantiated on a real-case application in Section 4. If Section 4 will be expanded, then the current section 5 is appropriate.
- Section 3 should describe all the requirements for Semantic Portal UI, while it is based only on the authors' experience in developing the "Sampo" portals. This is a very strong limitation. Other surveys should be cited to collect a complete list of requirements. For example the requirements from Klímek et al. [21] and Bikakis and Sellis [20] and also Po et al [NEW1]
Minor:
- page 10, line 9, remove the word "used" from the sentence
- table 1 please explain the "?" (what does "2020?" means?)
[NEW1] - Laura Po, Nikos Bikakis, Federico Desimoni, and George Papastefanatos; "Linked Data Visualization: Techniques, Tools and Big Data"; Synthesis Lectures on Data, Semantics and Knowledge, Morgan and Claypool Publishers 2020.
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