Semantic zoom: A details on demand visualisation technique for modelling OWL ontologies

Abstract

The ontological design and reuse processes sometimes become difficult, specially for medium or large ontologies, so visualisation techniques help to deal with them. Diverse tools such as ontology editors and modelling tools have been proposed to develop ontological engineering, most of them using graphs or UMLlike diagrams. These techniques are good enough for small ontologies, nevertheless, they fail for large ontologies due to they display too much information, resulting in cluttered graphs or overcrowded visualisations. The use of the semantic zoom technique represents a good option to deal with this problem, resulting in visualisations more clear and understandable. This paper analyses the currently most used tools for modelling or visualise ontologies, and proposes a visualisation making use of semantic zoom with our tool OWL-VisMod to develop a details on demand visualisation technique. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.