TY - JOUR
T1 - OntoPlot
T2 - a novel visualisation for non-hierarchical associations in large ontologies
AU - Yang, Ying
AU - Wybrow, Michael
AU - Li, Yuan Fang
AU - Czauderna, Tobias
AU - He, Yongqun
PY - 2020/1
Y1 - 2020/1
N2 - Ontologies are formal representations of concepts and complex relationships among them. They have been widely used to capture comprehensive domain knowledge in areas such as biology and medicine, where large and complex ontologies can contain hundreds of thousands of concepts. Especially due to the large size of ontologies, visualisation is useful for authoring, exploring and understanding their underlying data. Existing ontology visualisation tools generally focus on the hierarchical structure, giving much less emphasis to non-hierarchical associations. In this paper we present OntoPlot, a novel visualisation specifically designed to facilitate the exploration of all concept associations whilst still showing an ontology's large hierarchical structure. This hybrid visualisation combines icicle plots, visual compression techniques and interactivity, improving space-efficiency and reducing visual structural complexity. We conducted a user study with domain experts to evaluate the usability of OntoPlot, comparing it with the de facto ontology editor Protégé. The results confirm that OntoPlot attains our design goals for association-related tasks and is strongly favoured by domain experts.
AB - Ontologies are formal representations of concepts and complex relationships among them. They have been widely used to capture comprehensive domain knowledge in areas such as biology and medicine, where large and complex ontologies can contain hundreds of thousands of concepts. Especially due to the large size of ontologies, visualisation is useful for authoring, exploring and understanding their underlying data. Existing ontology visualisation tools generally focus on the hierarchical structure, giving much less emphasis to non-hierarchical associations. In this paper we present OntoPlot, a novel visualisation specifically designed to facilitate the exploration of all concept associations whilst still showing an ontology's large hierarchical structure. This hybrid visualisation combines icicle plots, visual compression techniques and interactivity, improving space-efficiency and reducing visual structural complexity. We conducted a user study with domain experts to evaluate the usability of OntoPlot, comparing it with the de facto ontology editor Protégé. The results confirm that OntoPlot attains our design goals for association-related tasks and is strongly favoured by domain experts.
KW - interactive exploration
KW - ontology associations
KW - Ontology visualisation
KW - visual compression
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075638553&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934557
DO - 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934557
M3 - Article
C2 - 31442991
AN - SCOPUS:85075638553
SN - 1077-2626
VL - 26
SP - 1140
EP - 1150
JO - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IS - 1
M1 - 8809833
ER -