User-Friendly Ontology Editing and Visualization Tools: The OWLeasyViz Approach

This paper aims to propose solutions to the issue of ontology visualization, by presenting intuitive and user-friendly ontology editing and visualization environments mainly oriented to domain experts. It starts with an overview of existing ontology visualization methods; afterwards it describes the Semantic DB system and the OWLeasyViz ontology editor. Semantic DB is a web application framework to create simple complete semantic web applications, integrating an ontology editor, a resource editor, an inference rule editor, a reasoner, and a search engine. OWLeasyViz is an ontology editor that combines a textual and a graphical representation of OWL ontologies. It meets different user needs by providing a simple and intuitive interface to end-users who are not ontologists, and offering more advanced tools to ontology experts. The OWLeasyViz editor is intended to be a module of a semantic web integrated working environment, developed within the context of a Swiss Government funded CTI applied research project in the domain of waste water management.