Generating Visualizations of Ontologies in the Logic Graphs Language

Abstract

In this research, we analyze the existing ontology visualization tools and conclude that there is no tool that represents the semantics of logical operations in ontologies, like Ch. S. Pierce's existential graphs does for first order logic. Previously we developed Logic Graphs -- the semantic-oriented visual language for ontologies, complete with respect to OWL DL. The goal of this research is to develop a tool for generating ontology visualizations in Logic Graphs. This tool parses an ontology to extract classes and their properties, converts ontology classes to their descriptions in dot format, and builds graphical representations of ontology classes from dot descriptions. Ontology visualization in Logic Graphs facilitates the perception of ontologies by users, and provides the possibility of diagrammatic reasoning.

Keywords

• ontology visualization
• diagrammatic reasoning
• knowledge representation
• logic graphs
• dot