CropCircles: Topology Sensitive Visualization of OWL Class Hierarchies

Abstract

OWL ontologies present many interesting visualization challenges. Here we present CropCircles, a technique designed to view the class hierarchies in ontologies as trees. We place special emphasis on topology understanding when designing the tool. We drew inspiration from treemaps, but made substantial changes in the representation and layout. Most notably, the spacefillingness of treemap is relaxed in exchange for visual clarity. We outline the problem scape of visualizing ontology hierarchies, note the requirements that go into the design of the tool, and discuss the interface and implementation. Finally, through a controlled experiment involving tasks common to understanding ontologies, we show the benefits of our design.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA455678

Entities

People

  • Bijan Parsia
  • Taowei D. Wang

Organizations

  • University of Maryland

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Aspect Ratio
  • Classification
  • Computer Science
  • Experimental Data
  • Geometry
  • Hierarchies
  • Information Operations
  • Mathematics
  • Microarray Analysis
  • Military Research
  • Ontologies
  • Statistics
  • Topology
  • Universities
  • Visualizations

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Geospatial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Analytics