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VOWL 2: User-Oriented Visualization of Ontologies

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Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8876))

Abstract

Ontologies become increasingly important as a means to structure and organize information. This requires methods and tools that enable not only ontology experts but also other user groups to work with ontologies and related data. We have developed VOWL, a comprehensive and well-specified visual language for the user-oriented representation of ontologies, and conducted a comparative study on an initial version of VOWL. Based upon results from that study, as well as an extensive review of other ontology visualizations, we have reworked many parts of VOWL. In this paper, we present the new version VOWL 2 and describe how the initial definitions were used to systematically redefine the visual notation. Besides the novelties of the visual language, which is based on a well-defined set of graphical primitives and an abstract color scheme, we briefly describe two implementations of VOWL 2. To gather some insight into the user experience with the new version of VOWL, we have conducted a qualitative user study. We report on the study and its results, which confirmed that not only the general ideas of VOWL but also most of our enhancements for VOWL 2 can be well understood by casual ontology users.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS), University of Stuttgart, Universitätsstr. 38, 70569, Stuttgart, Germany

    Steffen Lohmann, Florian Haag & Thomas Ertl

  2. Faculty of Computer Science, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Strada General Henri Mathias Berthelot 16, 700483, Iasi, Romania

    Stefan Negru

Authors
  1. Steffen Lohmann
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  2. Stefan Negru
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  3. Florian Haag
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  4. Thomas Ertl
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Krzysztof Janowicz

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Stefan Schlobach

  3. University of Linköping, Sweden

    Patrick Lambrix

  4. Aalto University, Finland

    Eero Hyvönen

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Lohmann, S., Negru, S., Haag, F., Ertl, T. (2014). VOWL 2: User-Oriented Visualization of Ontologies. In: Janowicz, K., Schlobach, S., Lambrix, P., Hyvönen, E. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. EKAW 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13704-9_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13704-9_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13703-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13704-9

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