Visualizing Complex Ontologies Through Sub-Ontology Extraction

Ontologies represent the backbone of the semantic web since they represent knowledge in a machine-understandable way. The more complex the ontologies are, the greater is the need for visualization tools to ease the understanding of the large amount of knowledge represented by these ontologies. Visualizing large ontologies is a still under-investigated interesting challenge. In this paper, we present VisCOnto, a visualization tool of complex ontologies by extracting sub-ontologies that correspond to excerpts of a large ontology focusing on some concepts of interest. VisCOnto combined with WEBVOWL can create sub-ontologies to create expressive information visualizations by harnessing the semantic reasoning capabilities provided by ontologies. A proof of concept use case for applying VisCOnto to visualize an existing complex ontology of human behavior and character is presented.