Visualizing a linguistic ontology with ling-graph

Abstract

We are proposing a semantic approach that aims to identify valid linguistic web services composition scenarios. It targets both linguistic and software engineering experts. It is based on an OWL 2 multilingual ontology, named LingOnto which models and reasons about linguistic knowledge. However, users especially non-ontology experts have difficulty to make sense of LingOnto as they do not understand OWL 2 syntax. Hence, we decide to visualize LingOnto to attempt this issue. Nevertheless, the current ontology visualization tools overlook the importance of the understandability issues which are particularly problematic for non-ontology experts. In this paper, we propose a user-friendly ontology visualization tool, called Ling-Graph. It targets both ontology and non-ontology experts and addresses the understandability requirement. This tool is also applied to visualize the PersonLink ontology for non-ontology experts and a large-scale ontology DBpedia for ontology experts. Finally, we discuss the promising results derived from the evaluation of Ling-Graph.