Abstract
There is empirical evidence that current user interfaces for ontology engineering are still inadequate in their ability to reduce task complexity for users, especially non-expert ones. Here we present a novel tool for visualizing and navigating ontologies, KC-Viz, which exploits an innovative ontology summarization method to support a “middle-out ontology browsing” approach, where it becomes possible to navigate ontologies starting from the most information-rich nodes (i.e., key concepts). This approach is similar to map-based visualization and navigation in geographical information systems, where, e.g., major cities are displayed more prominently than others, depending on the current level of granularity. Building on its powerful and empirically validated ontology summarization algorithm, KC-Viz provides a rich set of navigation and visualization mechanisms, including flexible zooming into and hiding of specific parts of an ontology, visualization of the most salient nodes, history browsing, saving and loading of customized ontology views, as well as essential interface support, such as graphical zooming, font manipulation, tree layout customization, and other functionalities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This network of ontologies can be downloaded from http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/smartproducts/ontologies/SP_v2_4.zip
- 2.
- 3.
This is because the relevant preference in the NeOn Toolkit is set to display all inherited classes, thus allowing us to browse the complete structure of the SmartProducts network of ontologies. Alternatively, we can choose to see only definitions local to the Philips-Test2 ontology, by deselecting the option “Show Imported Axioms.”
- 4.
If the node is owl:Thing, then we are talking about the size of the whole ontology, otherwise the size of a particular subtree.
- 5.
- 6.
All the examples in this paper have been generated using version 2.5 of the NeOn Toolkit and KC-Viz v1.3.0.
- 7.
It is important to point out that while Fig. 16.4 and later figures show exactly the concepts returned by KC-Viz, for the sake of readability we have, when appropriate, manually rearranged the layout, to try and minimize the compression caused by the physical size of this document. This is needed primarily because KC-Viz displays assume a landscape orientation, while this article is formatted according to a portrait orientation.
- 8.
Crucially, the option “Ontology summary considers also imported ontology” must be enabled in the KC-Viz preferences, otherwise only a summary of the concepts local to the Philips-Test2 ontology will be generated.
- 9.
- 10.
References
d’Aquin M, Sabou M, Motta E (2008) Reusing knowledge from the semantic web with the Watson Plugin. Demo at the 2008 international semantic web conference, Karlsruhe, Germany
Dzbor M, Motta E, Buil Aranda C, Gómez-Pérez JM, Goerlitz O, Lewen H (2006) Developing ontologies in OWL: an observational study. Workshop on OWL: experiences and directions, Athens, GA, USA, Nov 2006
Katifori A, Halatsis C, Lepouras G, Vassilakis C, Giannopoulou E (2007) Ontology visualization methods—a survey. ACM Comput Surv 39(4):Art.10
Peroni S, Motta E, d’Aquin M (2008) Identifying key concepts in an ontology through the integration of cognitive principles with statistical and topological measures. In: Third Asian Semantic Web Conference, Bangkok, Thailand
Plaisant C, Grosjean J, Bederson BB (2002) Spacetree: supporting exploration in large node link tree, design evolution and empirical evaluation. In: Proceedings of the international symposium on information visualization, 2002
Rosch E (1978) Principles of categorization. In: Cognition and categorization. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale
Shneiderman B (1992) Tree visualization with tree-maps: a 2d space-filling approach. ACM Trans Graph 11(1):92–99, 15
Shneiderman B (1996) The eyes have it: a task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. In: Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE symposium on Visual Languages (VL 1996), Boulder, CO, USA. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA
Souza K, Dos Santos A, Evangelista SRM (2003) Visualization of ontologies through hypertrees. In: Proceedings of the Latin American conference on Human-computer interaction, 2003, p 251–255
Tartir S, Arpinar IB, Moore M, Sheth AP, Aleman-ÙMeza B (2005) OntoQA: Metric-based ontology quality analysis. In Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition from Distributed, Autonomous, Semantically Heterogeneous Data and Knowledge Sources, co-located with the 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2005). November 27, 2005, Huston, Texas, USA
Wang TD, Parsia B (2006) Cropcircles: topology sensitive visualization of owl class hierarchies. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference 2006, Athens, GA, USA
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by funding from the European Commission, in the context of the NeOn and SmartProducts projects. The paper has benefited greatly from many insightful comments from Pierluigi Miraglia, who kindly suggested both ways to improve the presentation of this work as well as interesting new directions for future research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Motta, E., Peroni, S., Gómez-Pérez, J.M., d’Aquin, M., Li, N. (2012). Visualizing and Navigating Ontologies with KC-Viz. In: Suárez-Figueroa, M., Gómez-Pérez, A., Motta, E., Gangemi, A. (eds) Ontology Engineering in a Networked World. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24794-1_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24794-1_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24793-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24794-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)