Seminar: Interacting and Visualising Ontologies: The VOWL Notation

Ontologies are a well-established mechanism for structuring and organizing information, with a primary focus on classifying concepts in terms of semantics – with Web Ontology Language (OWL) as the Lingua Franca for representing them. Although tools have been developed for working and visualizing them, such tools often provide different visual representations – which can be confusing to users. Furthermore most of the ontology visualisation tools provide only a partial representation or even omit displaying some of the semantics encompassed in the ontology. The Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL) provides not only a visual language, but also an (interactive) graphical representation for elements of the Web Ontology Language. At its core VOWL is based on a mapping of OWL elements to a set of graphical primitives and a colour scheme, together conveying specific aspects of the Web Ontology Language. The result is (an interactive) force directed graph representing the (OWL) ontology. The talk presents the VOWL notation, its evolution, challenges and future directions of research. At the same time we will be focusing on presenting some of the tools that implement the VOWL notation WebVOWL and ProtégéVOWL. Such tools facilitate ontology engineers in order to easily explore and makes sense of the relationships and concepts in the ontology, but also casual’ ontology users to have an overview of the domain represented.’