OntoPlot: A Novel Visualisation for Non-hierarchical Associations in Large Ontologies

Abstract

Fig. 1: OntoPlot interface. Classes with associations are highlighted in colour based on the key on the right-hand side. A panel on the left (not shown) selects different types of non-hierarchy associations found within the ontology (denoted by the OWL object properties involved). The panel on the right provides search and displays additional information for selected classes (not shown).Abstract-Ontologies are formal representations of concepts and complex relationships among them. They have been widely used to capture comprehensive domain knowledge in areas such as biology and medicine, where large and complex ontologies can contain hundreds of thousands of concepts. Especially due to the large size of ontologies, visualisation is useful for authoring, exploring and understanding their underlying data. Existing ontology visualisation tools generally focus on the hierarchical structure, giving much less emphasis to non-hierarchical associations. In this paper we present OntoPlot, a novel visualisation specifically designed to facilitate the exploration of all concept associations whilst still showing an ontology's large hierarchical structure. This hybrid visualisation combines icicle plots, visual compression techniques and interactivity, improving space-efficiency and reducing visual structural complexity. We conducted a user study with domain experts to evaluate the usability of OntoPlot, comparing it with the de facto ontology editor Protégé. The results confirm that OntoPlot attains our design goals for association-related tasks and is strongly favoured by domain experts.

Ontology Explorer: An Ontology-Based Visual Analytics System for Exploring Time Series Data in Oil and Gas

“…For example, a user could start by selecting a particular well or equipment class, followed by the instance of interest or one or more particular components, and choose one or more properties for that artifact. While many works describe more elaborate ways to visually interact with ontologies [7,12,14,20,21,24], in this work, we strive for a simple design that can be used to demonstrate the value of using an ontological model with data and defer to using more sophisticated interfaces in the future. Our architecture allows the evolution and expansion of the domain ontology while the interface dynamically reflects its actual state in associating the meaning to the data.…”