Navigation Over a Large Ontology for Industrial Web Applications

Abstract

Ontologies for industrial semantic web applications are often very large. This is especially true in scientific and engineering applications where there exists a large pool of technical terminology necessary for operation within the domain. In this paper we look at the problem of presenting this domain ontology to users for navigation within web applications. The conventional tree view can be considered to be cumbersome and awkward to navigate for ontologies that have a very large breadth and/or depth. We present three approaches to this ontology presentation problem -content dependent filtering, autocompletion text box and partial segments using drop-down lists. All the approaches attempt to limit the ontology presented to users at one time. We implemented two of the proposed methods of ontology presentation in our demonstrators and have received positive and valuable feedback from engineers.