Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Show Me What You Mean! Exploiting Domain Semantics In Ontology Visualization, Ravi Pavagada, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York

Kno.e.sis Publications

Ontologies build the backbone for many life-sciences applications. These ontologies, however, are represented in XML based languages that are meant for machine-consumption and hence are difficult for humans to comprehend. For a meaningful visualization of these ontologies, it is important that the display of entities and relationships captures the cognitive representation of the domain as perceived by the domain experts. In this paper we present OntoVista, an ontology visualization tool that is adaptable to the needs of different domains, especially in the life sciences. While keeping the graph structures as the predominant model, we provide a semantically enhanced graph display …