Ontology based semantics and graphical notation as directedgraphs

["Johann Hoechtl" <johann.hoechtl@donau-uni.ac.at>]

Dear SET Members,

after the last enlightening speech of Scott Hinkelmann I mentioned a
tool called graphviz to visualize ontology based semantic
representations.

First graphviz
http://www.graphviz.org/ 
is a tool which takes a specific grammar (the dot-language) as input
and produces directed graphs as output using 'intelligent' layout
algorithms as to minimize intersecting graph lines. The tool in itself
is not related to sematics or knowledge representatian but completely
domain agnostic. Directed _Acyclic_ Graphs are a specialisation of
Directed Graphs, so this tool is perfectly appropriate.

Additional tools exists which perform a transformation from semanic
representations to this tool-specific grammar, the most domain-specific
probably are

[1] IsaViz , Assuman already mentioned.
http://www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz/ 

Unfortunately I am not aware of any tool which uses XSLT to perform
this translation, instead W3C proposed an alternative display
translation vocabulary,

Fresnel
http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fresnel-info/ 

This may be worth a look to take as free Java API's exist, maybe for
CAM?



Another tool I am aware of is Protégé which has an OWLViz-Plugin which
looks very capable and employs also grpahviz as the layout engine:

[2] http://protege.stanford.edu/ the umbrella
http://protege.stanford.edu/overview/protege-owl.html the owl
visualizer

Screenshot
http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/owl/images/OWLViz-BackpackersDestination.png






As for the proposed presentation for the next meeting I could collect
information how these tools operate (which input format they support,
how the translation process works and if they support interactive,
visual modelling of the semantics, etc.)

Regards,


Johann Höchtl

-- 
 
Mag. Johann Höchtl
Zentrum für E-Government
Donau-Universität Krems
Dr.-Karl-Dorrek-Straße 30
A-3500 Krems
Tel.: ++43 2732 893 2304
Mail: Johann.hoechtl@donau-uni.ac.at
 
===============================
Veranstaltung: E-Government Fachtagung 2009
http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/egov/symposium
===============================