Project Topic Proposal: Visualization of Ontologies and RDF Graphs
27/12/11 11:46 Filed in: 481
The underlying data structures for ontologies and RDF (Resource Data Framework) structures are graphs. While graphs in principle are well suited for visualization purposes, there are several challenges for these particular structures. Ontologies frequently have a multitude of relationships (links in the graph), and it is impractical to display all of them simultaneously. RDF graphs frequently are huge, and can’t be displayed in their entirety. In both cases, however, there are underlying principles that humans intuitively utilize to arrange the nodes in both a visually pleasing and easy to comprehend manner (although it may be very difficult or impossible to achieve both). The objective of this project is to examine existing visualization methods for ontologies and RDF graph, and identify their advantages and shortcomings. On the other side, there are packages available for displaying generic graphs. Our hope is that a combination of insights from the existing visualization tools with advanced graph display packages, together with heuristics that reflect organizational principles for ontologies and RDF graphs will result in better visualization tools. Ideally, a prototype of such an ontology visualization tool would be integrated with the Protégé ontology development environment.