Visualization of Large Ontologies with Landmarks

Ontologies are building blocks of the Semantic Web and are essential for knowledge representation and data integration. Interactive visualization is an important tool for the understanding of ontologies, especially large ones. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical ontology visualization method for effectively visualizing an ontology’s global landmarks, local structure and individual class’ details. We have implemented a visualization system that can handle large ontologies efficiently. Preliminary evaluation indicates that the method and the system can be effectively used to understand large ontologies.