A Visual Language for OWL Lite Editing

While ontologies are a powerful means for knowledge representation, they are not as wide spread as one would think. A major reason for this fact is the lack of an intuitive visual editor. The visual language presented in this poster tackles part of this problem in that is was developed for a visual editor that allows on-line consistency checking of visual editing steps, i.e. preventing to describe instance configurations that are not allowed by the corresponding class descriptions. The visual language is closely linked to the editor's data model and covers all elements of OWL lite. It is comprised of twelve elements in total, two node elements and ten link types. The language has been implemented in a prototype version of the editor and used to visualize a number of publicly available OWL lite ontologies.