Information visualization and the semantic web

Abstract

The Semantic Web emphasizes that data should be machine-understandable, whereas information visualization aims to maximize our perceptional and cognitive abilities to make sense of visual-spatial representations of abstract information structures. One of the fundamental requirements of the Semantic Web is to annotate Web data with ontology to accomplish machine-understandable Web. Will they fit to work along with one another? Our illustrative example is intended to demonstrate that on the one hand, the Semantic Web can largely simplify some information visualization tasks today, and semantic annotation can be utilized for semantic visualization; on the other hand, the two fields differ from their philosophical groundings to tactical approaches to individual problems such as knowledge modeling and representation. A lot of theoretical and practical work remains to be done to find the right track for the two fields to work together harmoniously. © 2006 Springer-Verlag London Limited.