Towards a unified visual notation for OWL ontologies: insights from a comparative user study

ABSTRACT

Browsing ontologies and making sense of their concepts and relationships are important activities in knowledge engineering. They are supported by a large number of tools that often provide visual representations of the ontologies for better illustration. However, different notations are used to represent the ontologies which can be confusing when switching tools. Furthermore, many representations provide only basic overviews of the ontologies that are not sufficient to get a deeper understanding of the concepts and relationships. A unified visual notation for OWL ontologies would be most helpful to overcome these limitations. Having this goal in mind, we compare two different notations for OWL ontologies in this paper: the UML profile of the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) and the Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL). We report on a comparative user study of these notations and discuss benefits and limitations raised by the study participants. Based on these findings, we draw some general conclusions regarding the development of a unified visual notation for OWL ontologies.

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