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Towards a Visual Notation for OWL: A Brief Summary of VOWL

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Ontology Engineering (OWLED 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9557))

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Abstract

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) has no standardized visual notation in contrast to related modeling languages. However, the visual representation of individual and combined OWL elements as well as complete OWL ontologies can be very useful in many cases. We have developed the Visual Notation for OWL (VOWL) that defines graphical representations for most of the OWL language constructs. In contrast to related work, VOWL aims at a complete and well-specified notation that is easy to understand and implement. This paper reports on the current state of development and briefly describes the main design principles and considerations. At OWLED 2015, we conducted a special session to gather feedback on how to further improve the visual notation and to collect requirements for its future development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/VisualDataWeb/webprotege.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our former and current students David Bold, Vincent Link, and Eduard Marbach for their excellent contributions to the implementation of VOWL and their valuable feedback on the notation.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Steffen Lohmann & Florian Haag

  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. Florian Haag
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  3. Stefan Negru
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steffen Lohmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Valentina Tamma

  2. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Mauro Dragoni

  3. BMIR, Stanford Center for Biomedical Inf, Stanford, California, USA

    Rafael Gonçalves

  4. Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland

    Agnieszka Ławrynowicz

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Lohmann, S., Haag, F., Negru, S. (2016). Towards a Visual Notation for OWL: A Brief Summary of VOWL. In: Tamma, V., Dragoni, M., Gonçalves, R., Ławrynowicz, A. (eds) Ontology Engineering. OWLED 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9557. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33245-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33245-1_15

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