Outlines for dynamic visualization of semantic web data

Abstract

Ontologies, the data model underpinning the Semantic Web vision, are nowadays widely used to represent data from different origins and of diverse nature, supported by a plethora of tools for the storage and querying of ontologies. However, in the area of information visualization there is still much to be achieved. Several strategies and implementations have appeared over the past years as a result of the increase in publicly available data modelled as Resource Description Framework (RDF). The problem of representing this data using charts, dashboards, maps and so on has become pressing, in particular to prove the value of the Semantic Web to enhance the analysis of business data. In this paper we describe the problem of ontology visualization by presenting the major approaches, focusing on the problems that prevent these approaches from providing an automatic, dynamic, generic and flexible ontology visualization tool for analytical purposes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.