OntView: What you See is What you Meant

TL;DR

OntView is an intuitive ontology visualization tool that accurately represents inferred knowledge, including GCIs, and offers customizable views to improve understanding of complex ontologies.

Contribution

It introduces OntView, a novel ontology viewer that visualizes inferred knowledge and GCIs, with features for simplified and focused views, enhancing comprehension of large ontologies.

Findings

Effective visualization of inferred knowledge and GCIs.

Supports ontology summarization and dynamic branch management.

Open-source release for community use.

Abstract

In the field of knowledge management and computer science, ontologies provide a structured framework for modeling domain-specific knowledge by defining concepts and their relationships. However, the lack of tools that provide effective visualization is still a significant challenge. While numerous ontology editors and viewers exist, most of them fail to graphically represent ontology structures in a meaningful and non-overwhelming way, limiting users' ability to comprehend dependencies and properties within large ontological frameworks. In this paper, we present OntView, an ontology viewer that is designed to provide users with an intuitive visual representation of ontology concepts and their formal definitions through a user-friendly interface. Building on the use of a DL reasoner, OntView follows a "What you see is what you meant" paradigm, showing the actual inferred knowledge. One key aspect for this is its ability to visualize General Concept Inclusions (GCI), a feature absent in existing visualization tools. Moreover, to avoid a possible information overload, OntView also offers different ways to show a simplified view of the ontology by: 1) creating ontology summaries by assessing the importance of the concepts (according to different available algorithms), 2) focusing the visualization on the existing TBox elements between two given classes and 3) allowing to hide/show different branches in a dynamic way without losing the semantics. OntView has been released with an open-source license for the whole community.