3.6 Summary
This chapter has demonstrated an elegant way to visually represent ontological data. We have described how the Cluster Map visualization can use ontologies to create expressive information visualizations, with the attractive property that classes and objects that are semantically related are also spatially close in the visualization.
Another key aspect of the visualization is that it focuses on visualizing instances rather than ontological models, thereby making it very useful for information retrieval purposes.
A number of applications developed in the past few years have been described that prominently incorporate the Cluster Map visualization. Based on these descriptions, we could distinguish a number of generic information retrieval tasks that are well supported by the visualization.
These applications prove the usability and usefulness of the Cluster Map in real-life scenarios. Furthermore, these applications show the applicability of the visualization in Semantic Web-based environments, where lightweight ontologies are playing a crucial role in organizing and accessing heterogeneous and decentralized information sources.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
3.7 References
Bonifacio, M., Bouquet, P., Traverso, P. (2002). Enabling distributed knowledge management: Managerial and technological implications. Novatica and Informatik/Informatique III.
Broekstra, J., Van Harmelen, F., Kampman, A. (2002). Sesame: A generic architecture for storing and querying RDF and RDF Schema. Proceedings of the First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC’02).
Eades, P. (1984). A heuristic for graph drawing. Congressus Numerantium, 42:149–160.
Fluit, C., Sabou, M., Van Harmelen, F. (2002). Ontology-based information visualisation. In: Geroimenko, V., Chen, C. (Eds.), Visualizing the Semantic Web. Springer-Verlag.
Fluit, C., Sabou, M., Van Harmelen, F. (2003). Supporting user tasks through visualisation of lightweight ontologies. Ontology Handbook. Springer-Verlag.
Hemmje, M., Kunkel, C., Willett, A. (1994). Lyberworld: A visualization user interface supporting full text retrieval. Proceedings of the 17th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference, pp. 249–259.
Korfhage, R. (1991). To see or not to see—is that the query? Proceedings of the 14th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference, pp. 134–141.
Marchionini, G. (1995). Information Seeking in Electronic Environments. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Shneiderman, B. (1996). The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (VL’ 96), pp. 336–343.
Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing the User Interface. Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley, pp. 509–551.
Stuckenschmidt, H., De Waard, A., Bhogal, R., Fluit, C., Kampman, A., Van Buel, J., Van Mulligen, E., Broekstra, J., Crowlesmith, I., Van Harmelen, F., Scerri, T. (2004). A topic-based browser for large online resources. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’04).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fluit, C., Sabou, M., van Harmelen, F. (2006). Ontology-Based Information Visualization: Toward Semantic Web Applications. In: Geroimenko, V., Chen, C. (eds) Visualizing the Semantic Web. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-290-X_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-290-X_3
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-85233-976-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-84628-290-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)