Emerging Visual Modeling Technology:
Visual Ontology Languages
A Visual Ontology Language is a special-purpose graphic graphic language that is used to specify conceptual models useful for domain analysis. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a W3C Semantic Web standard, and is currently the most popular text-based ontology specification language. This section tracks efforts to visualize OWL (VOWL = Visual OWL) and other ontology specification languages.
Overview
Visual Ontology Languages |
|||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Description: |
A Visual Ontology Language is a special-purpose graphic graphic language that is used to specify conceptual models useful for domain analysis. |
||||||||||
Linguistic Classification: |
Artificial Language / Visual Modeling Language Prototype (Ad hoc; Work-in-Progress) General purpose? Open standard? Formal semantics? Executable semantics? / [optional & typically tool dependent] Certifiable compliance? |
||||||||||
Origin/Derivation: |
Visual Ontology languages have been evolving from the fusion of several complementary technologies for more than a decade: AI knowledge representation languages, Web Ontology Language (OWL), and UML as a General-Purpose Modeling Languages. |
||||||||||
Usage: |
|
Resources
Standards & Tools
Open Standards
- The OMG's Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) includes UML profiles for RDF and OWL, which provide a standard graphical notation for RDF vocabulary and OWL ontology development using UML tools. Read more...
Free & Open Source Tools/ Standard Languages
- Protégé (Stanford)Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework that supports two main ways of modeling ontologies via the Protégé-Frames and Protégé-OWL editors. Protégé ontologies can be exported into a variety of formats including RDF(S), OWL, and XML Schema. Read more...
- violet-owl - VIsual OntoLogy Engineering Tool (Google Project )A Protégé 4 plug-in that enables the visual editing of ontologies in the widely-used application Protégé. The editor is based in the GEF library, OWL-API and Protégé API. Read more...
Commercial Tools/ Standard Languages
- TopBraid Composer (TopQuadrant)
TopBraid Composer is an enterprise modeling environment for developing Semantic Web ontologies and building semantic applications. Composer is implemented as an Eclipse plugin, and supports RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. Read more... - Visual Ontology Modeler (Sandpiper Software)The Visual Ontology Modeler is a UML-based visual application for building component-based ontologies that includes import/export facilities in XML schema, RDF, OWL, DAML, and MOF formats. Read more...
References
Papers & Articles
- "Techniques for Ontology Visualization," X. Wang and J. Almeida, Semantic Web 2007, Part III, pp. 185-203, 2007.
- "Building a Visual Ontology for Video Retrieval," L. Hollink and M. Worring, Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2005.