Making Complex Ontologies End User Accessible via Ontology Projections

Abstract

Ontologies are a powerful mechanism to structure domains of interest. They have successfully been applied in medical domain, industry and other important areas. Despite the simplicity of ontological vocabularies that consist of classes and properties, ontologies can relate elements of the vocabulary with the help of axioms in a very non-trivial way. Thus, the relationship between classes and properties can become hardly accessible by end users thus affecting the practical value of ontologies. Indeed, it is essential for end users to be able to navigate or browse through an ontology, to get a big picture of what classes there are and what they have in common in terms of other related classes and properties. This helps end users in effectively performing various knowledge engineering tasks such as querying and domain exploration. To this end, in this short paper, we describe an approach to project OWL 2 ontologies into graphs and show how to leverage this approach in practical systems for visual query formulation and faceted search that we tested in various scenarios.