Visualization of Subsumption Hierarchies in Ontologies
Anis Zarrad, Volker Haarslev · 2005
Abstract: The RACER system is a knowledge representation system that implements description logic reasoning. It offers reasoning and evaluation services for multiple concepts (TBox) and multiple individuals (ABox) as well. The RACER system responds to taxonomy queries related to description logic. The body of the response contains information about a relational structure called a concept hierarchy or subsumption hierarchy. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to visualize the concept hierarchies by producing several geometric representations. The display of the concept hierarchy in a single screen has been proven to be useful and helpful for ontology designers. In fact they can easily identify the hidden relations that were discovered during the Tbox classification process. Key words: ontology; layered graph; autonomous sets, drawing algorithm 1