I2DEE: An integrated and interactive data exploration environment used for ontology design

Abstract

Many communities need to organize and structure data to improve their utilization and sharing. Much research has been focused on this problem. Many solutions are based on a Terminological and Ontological Resource (TOR) which represents the domain knowledge for a given application. However TORs are often designed without taking into account heterogeneous data from specific resources. For example, in the biomedical domain, these sources may be medical reports, bibliographical resources or biological data extracted from GOA, Gene Ontology or KEGG. This paper presents an integrated visual environment for knowledge engineering. It integrates heterogeneous data from domain databases. Relevant concepts and relations are thus extracted from data resources, using several analysis and treatment processes. The resulting ontology embryo is visualized through a user friendly adaptive interface displaying a knowledge map. The experiments and evaluations dealt with in this paper concern biological data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.