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Towards a unified visual notation for OWL ontologies: insights from a comparative user study

Published: 04 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Browsing ontologies and making sense of their concepts and relationships are important activities in knowledge engineering. They are supported by a large number of tools that often provide visual representations of the ontologies for better illustration. However, different notations are used to represent the ontologies which can be confusing when switching tools. Furthermore, many representations provide only basic overviews of the ontologies that are not sufficient to get a deeper understanding of the concepts and relationships. A unified visual notation for OWL ontologies would be most helpful to overcome these limitations. Having this goal in mind, we compare two different notations for OWL ontologies in this paper: the UML profile of the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) and the Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL). We report on a comparative user study of these notations and discuss benefits and limitations raised by the study participants. Based on these findings, we draw some general conclusions regarding the development of a unified visual notation for OWL ontologies.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
I-SEMANTICS '13: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Semantic Systems
September 2013
158 pages
ISBN:9781450319720
DOI:10.1145/2506182
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

  • St. Pölten University: St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, Austria
  • HPI: Hasso-Plattner-Institut
  • Compass Verlag: Compass Verlag
  • Wolters Kluwer: Wolters Kluwer, Germany
  • Semantic Web Company: Semantic Web Company
  • TUG: Technical University of Graz

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 September 2013

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Author Tags

  1. OWL
  2. UML
  3. VOWL
  4. ontology visualization
  5. semantic web

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  • Research-article

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ISEM '13
Sponsor:
  • St. Pölten University
  • HPI
  • Compass Verlag
  • Wolters Kluwer
  • Semantic Web Company
  • TUG

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Overall Acceptance Rate 40 of 182 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Improving entity linking by combining semantic entity embeddings and cross-attention encoderJournal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems10.3233/JIFS-23312446:1(2899-2910)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2024
  • (2020)Linked Data Visualization: Techniques, Tools, and Big DataSynthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology10.2200/S00967ED1V01Y201911WBE01910:1(1-157)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2020
  • (2017)The situation universeProceedings of the Eurographics/IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization: Short Papers10.2312/eurovisshort.20171153(175-179)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2017
  • (2016)Visualizing ontologies with VOWLSemantic Web10.3233/SW-1502007:4(399-419)Online publication date: 27-May-2016
  • (2016)Extraction and Visualization of TBox Information from SPARQL EndpointsKnowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management10.1007/978-3-319-49004-5_46(713-728)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2016
  • (2016)OntoBench: Generating Custom OWL 2 Benchmark OntologiesThe Semantic Web – ISWC 201610.1007/978-3-319-46547-0_13(122-130)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2016
  • (2015)Towards a Visual Notation for OWLRevised Selected Papers of the 12th International Experiences and Directions Workshop on Ontology Engineering - Volume 955710.1007/978-3-319-33245-1_15(143-153)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2015
  • (2015)QueryVOWL: A Visual Query Notation for Linked DataThe Semantic Web: ESWC 2015 Satellite Events10.1007/978-3-319-25639-9_51(387-402)Online publication date: 31-May-2015
  • (2015)QueryVOWL: Visual Composition of SPARQL QueriesThe Semantic Web: ESWC 2015 Satellite Events10.1007/978-3-319-25639-9_12(62-66)Online publication date: 31-May-2015
  • (2015)WebVOWL: Web-based Visualization of OntologiesKnowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management10.1007/978-3-319-17966-7_21(154-158)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2015
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