Contextual visualization of ontological models
Jozef Vrana, Martin Džbor, Kristína Machová · 2009
Ontologies as a set of concepts and their relations have been proven useful in a wide range of areas. More importantly ontologies represent an essential technology for building semantic web applications. Help user orienting in a wide offering of ontologies on the Web is at root of making semantic Web practical. Thus, it is necessary to provide a simple, comprehensive and efficient tool to support decision making about which ontologies are suitable for certain purposes and, eventually, which subset of ontologies can be used. The idea underlying presented approach is that the problem consists of two sub-tasks, namely, ontology evaluation and ontology visualization. Both are equally important and together yield an ability of making well-informed decisions; they provide a new point of view on ontologies than has been available so far. A significant number of visualization and evaluation tools struggle with resolution issues emerging when a large amount of information needs to be displayed. Rather than showing all topological classes, properties and instances we preferred data filtering, results of which are summarized and presented to the user. This is based on assumption that not all concepts existing in an ontology are necessary to be visually shown in order to understand the domain of a particular document.