Towards Self-explanatory Ontology Visualization with Contextual Verbalization
This addresses the challenge for domain experts in Semantic Web projects who need to interpret complex ontologies, though it is an incremental improvement over existing visualization and verbalization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of making ontologies more understandable for domain experts by combining visual notations with contextual verbalizations, resulting in a system that provides both high-level overviews and detailed textual explanations of selected elements.
Ontologies are one of the core foundations of the Semantic Web. To participate in Semantic Web projects, domain experts need to be able to understand the ontologies involved. Visual notations can provide an overview of the ontology and help users to understand the connections among entities. However, the users first need to learn the visual notation before they can interpret it correctly. Controlled natural language representation would be readable right away and might be preferred in case of complex axioms, however, the structure of the ontology would remain less apparent. We propose to combine ontology visualizations with contextual ontology verbalizations of selected ontology (diagram) elements, displaying controlled natural language (CNL) explanations of OWL axioms corresponding to the selected visual notation elements. Thus, the domain experts will benefit from both the high-level overview provided by the graphical notation and the detailed textual explanations of particular elements in the diagram.