Visual Reasoning about Ontologies

Introduction. The primary (formal) notations for ontology modelling are symbolic, such as description logics or OWL [2]. The provision of symbolic notations, along with highly efficient reasoning support, facilitates ontology specification, but need not be accessible to the broad range of users. Using diagrammatic notations for reasoning, in addition to specification, can bring benefits. Standard ontology editors often support a visualization; Protégé includes a plug-in visualization package, OWLVis, that shows derived hierarchical relationships between the concepts in the ontology and, thus, is very limited. Currently, some diagrammatic notations have been used for specifying ontologies, but they are either not formalized [3] or do not offer many of the benefits that good diagrammatic notations afford [4]. In [6], we proposed ontology diagrams, which we now rename concept diagrams, for ontology modelling. We extend [6] by demonstrating how one can reason using concept diagrams.