Ontology Visualization: One Size Does Not Fit All

Abstract

Visualization techniques have been used for ontology representation to allow the comprehension of concepts and properties in specific domains. Due to the complexity and size of ontologies such techniques need to be efficient in showing all the concepts and relationships in a intuitive visualization. We propose a novel use of the Degree of Interest notion in order to reduce the complexity of the representation itself and draw the user attention to the main concepts for a given task. Through an automatic analysis of the ontology aspects, we place the main concept in focus, distinguishing it from the unnecessary information and facilitating the analysis and understanding of correlated data. This new Degree of Interest calculation can be easily adapted to different user tasks. Besides, we extended a multiple coordinated views approach proposed in previous works for exploring the intensional structure of an ontology. We also present a tool implementing these ideas as a proof-of-concept prototype.