Supporting User Tasks through Visualisation of Light-weight Ontologies

Christiaan Fluit
Marta Sabou
Frank van Harmelen

Since ontologies will be used to suport a variety of different tasks, and since experience from other fields has shown that visualisation techniques can be successfully used to support these tasks, this chapter investigates the use of ontology-based visualisation techniques for a variety of different tasks.
Since we expect light-weight ontologies to play a prominent role on the Semantic Web, we concentrate on visualisation for such light-weight ontologies.
We present a brief survey of visualisation techniques for the Semantic Web. Based on an analysis of the shortcomings of these techniques, we propose Cluster Maps as a novel visualisation technique, and we show how a number of user tasks can be suported with such Cluster Maps: data analysis, monitoring, querying and navigation.
Our explanations of the visualisations are backed up with illustrations from two application projects.
(PDF paper, 1.7Mb!)

@InProceedings{OntoHandbook03Viz,
   title=       "Supporting User Tasks through Visualisation of 
                  Light-weight Ontologies",
  author =        "Christiaan Fluit and Marta Sabou and Frank van Harmelen",
  editor =       "S. Staab and R. Studer",
  booktitle =    "Handbook on Ontologies in Information Systems",
  publisher =    "Springer-Verlag",
  pages =        "415-434",
  year =         2003,
  keywords = {Semantic Web},
  urlPaper = "http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/OntoHandbook03Viz.pdf"
}