A Novel Approach to Visualizing and Navigating Ontologies

Abstract

Abstract. Observational studies in the literature have highlighted low levels of user satisfaction in relation to the support for ontology visualization and exploration provided by current ontology engineering tools. These issues are particularly problematic for non-expert users, who rely on effective tool support to abstract from representational details and to be able to make sense of the contents and the structure of ontologies. To address these issues, we have developed a novel solution for visualizing and navigating ontologies, KC-Viz, which exploits an empirically-validated ontology summarization method, both to provide concise views of large ontologies, and also to support a 'middle-out' ontology navigation approach, starting from the most information-rich nodes (key concepts). In this paper we present the main features of KC-Viz and also discuss the encouraging results derived from a preliminary empirical evaluation, which suggest that the use of KC-Viz provides performance advantages to users tackling realistic browsing and visualization tasks. Supplementary data gathered through questionnaires also convey additional interesting findings, including evidence that prior experience in ontology engineering affects not just objective performance in ontology engineering tasks but also subjective views on the usability of ontology engineering tools.

VOWL 2: User-Oriented Visualization of Ontologies

“…However, only few visualizations show the complete ontology, but most focus on certain parts of it. For instance, OWLViz [21], OntoTrack [27], and KC-Viz [31] depict only the class hierarchy of ontologies. OWLPropViz [37], OntoGraf [11], and FlexViz [12] represent different types of property relations, but do not show datatype properties and property characteristics required to fully understand ontologies.…”

Roadmapping and Navigating in the Ontology Visualization Landscape

“…F14 Drag&Drop User Layout: allowing to move the individual nodes around. F15 Clustering: 'intelligent' grouping of nodes or displaying a subset of 'important' nodes, as in KC-Viz [15]. F16 Integration with Editing: the user can select a visualized node or edge and edit its properties in, e.g., a pop-up window.…”

Visualization of Large Ontologies with Landmarks

“…Recently, KC-Viz (Motta et al, 2011), a nodelink-based ontology visualization tool has been developed as part of the NeON project. 8 KC-Viz uses a hybrid representation of an indented list for class listing and a node-link graph for local structure.…”

“…The use of a landmark overview for navigating in large networks has previously been used for visualizing the structure of large websites (Mukherjea and Hara, 1997). In a closely related idea, the papers (Peroni et al, 2008;Motta et al, 2011) suggest providing an abstraction of the taxonomy by showing the sub-taxonomy for selected key concepts. However, as discussed in the previous section, the design of their visualization model differs significantly from ours.…”