Visualizing and navigating ontologies with kc-viz

There is empirical evidence that current user interfaces for ontology engineering are still inadequate in their ability to reduce task complexity for users, especially non-expert ones. Here we present a novel tool for visualizing and navigating ontologies, KC-Viz, which exploits an innovative ontology summarization method to support a “middle-out ontology browsing” approch where it becomes possible to navigate ontologies starting from the most information-rich nodes (i.e., key concepts). This approach is similar to map-based visualization and navigation in geographical information systems, where, e.g., major cities are displayed more prominently than others, depending on the current level of granularity. Building on its powerful and empirically validated ontology summarization algorithm, KC-Viz provides a rich set of navigation and visualization mechanisms, including flexible zooming into and hiding of specific parts of an ontology, visualization of the most salient nodes, history browsing, saving and loading of customized ontology views, as well as essential interface support, such as graphical zooming, font manipulation, tree layout customization, and other functionalities.