CropCircles: Topology Sensitive Visualization of OWL Class Hierarchies

From semanticweb.org

A paper written by Bijan Parsia and Taowei Wang. It was presented at the ISWC2006.

[edit] 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 task common to understanding ontologies, we show the benefits of our design.

The schedule for this talk can be found in the conference programme and a linked list of all talks is provided in the article on ISWC2006 papers. This article has originally been created from the RDF metadata for ISWC 2006.