Visual analysis for ontology engineering

An ontology may be decomposed into a layer of binary fact types and a layer of application specific constraints imposed on these fact types. An ontology base is a large set of binary fact types called lexons. This paper presents LexoVis, a lexon visualization tool that addresses the inherent size and scale of ontology bases. LexoVis facilitates the analysis of lexons by providing an ordered visual representation. This representation offers overview and detail by employing the graphical fisheye view. Different ordering and clustering heuristics incorporated in LexoVis lead to insights not explicit in text-based representations of lexons.