Re: [Ann] WebVOWL 0.3 - Visualize your ontology on the web

On 05.01.2015 16:29, Stian Soiland-Reyes wrote:
> This is great stuff!

Thank you, Stian. We are glad to hear that.

> I tried it with my ontology PAV - and it seems it is struggling a bit
> because PAV (deliberately) don't have a defined domain and range on
> object properties:
>
> http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/webvowl/#iri=http://purl.org/pav/
>
> Hence everything goes from and to Thing in the centre, which makes it
> a bit clotted - I could not use the "Gravity" setting to space out the
> properties.
>
> In our manually made diagram I show this using additional "vague"
> resource boxes - perhaps each "unbound" property could just get an
> empty dotted box on the outside instead of going back to Thing?
>
> http://pav-ontology.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/images/pav-overview.png

If there is a large set of properties without domain and range axioms in 
an ontology, the current WebVOWL rendering is indeed not perfect. Your 
PAV ontology is a good example for this. We will think about possible 
alternatives to adapt or extend the splitting rules of VOWL 2 - 
http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/v2/#splittingRules .

> Here's a nice view that I liked, using PROV-O
>
> http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/webvowl/#iri=http://www.w3.org/ns/prov-o

The visualization is nice but not 100% complete yet, as the current 
WebVOWL implementation does not render properties with multiple domain 
or range axioms properly at the moment (e.g., the property "hadActivity" 
has more than one domain). We are working on that issue and it will 
likely be resolved in the next WebVOWL release.

> Is it possible to turn off the "Subclass of" label and only show the line?

Several people asked for that already, so we plan to include some kind 
of "expert mode" with a "reduced notation" in the next WebVOWL release. 
However, we do not want to remove that label from the initial 
visualization, as it clarifies the direction of the subclass relation 
and is important to make VOWL understandable to casual users, as we 
found out in our evaluations - see our papers on VOWL linked at 
http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/v2/#references

> Would it be possible to save a link to a particular view (without
> having to save the SVG)?  That navigation state fits much better in
> the # parameters than the iri= I would belive.

This is a tricky question, as it would require to save the node 
positions of the VOWL graph in an annotated JSON or the like. The 
current VOWL-JSON is not optimized for that, but we may incorporate such 
a feature in one of the next releases (though I cannot promise).

> I know it's not a proper ontology - yet people still like it for some
> reason. Here however it fails with "Ontology could not be loaded.
> Conversion failed. "
>
> http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/webvowl/#iri=http://purl.org/dc/terms/

This is because the vocabulary misses some OWL constructs that are 
expected by WebVOWL (e.g., an ontology IRI). We will try to fix it and 
also allow the parsing of such RDFS vocabularies in the next WebVOWL 
release.

Many thanks again for your feedback - very useful,
Steffen


> On 19 December 2014 at 15:49, Steffen Lohmann
> <steffen.lohmann@vis.uni-stuttgart.de>  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> we are glad to announce the release of WebVOWL 0.3, which integrates our
>> OWL2VOWL converter now. WebVOWL works in modern web browsers without any
>> installation so that ontologies can be instantly visualized. Check it out
>> at:http://vowl.visualdataweb.org/webvowl.html
>>
>> To the best of our knowledge, WebVOWL is the first comprehensive ontology
>> visualization completely based on open web standards (HTML, SVG, CSS,
>> JavaScript). It implements VOWL 2, which has been designed in a
>> user-oriented process and is clearly specified at
>> http://vowl.visualdataweb.org  (incl. references to scientific papers).
>>
>> Please note that:
>> - WebVOWL is a tool for ontology visualization, not for ontology modeling.
>> - VOWL considers many language constructs of OWL but not all of them yet.
>> - VOWL focuses on the visualization of the TBox of small to medium-size
>> ontologies but does not sufficiently support the visualization of very large
>> ontologies and detailed ABox information for the time being.
>> - WebVOWL 0.3 implements the VOWL 2 specification nearly completely, but the
>> current version of the OWL2VOWL converter does not.
>> These issues are subject to future work.
>>
>> Have fun with it!
>>
>> On behalf of the VOWL team,
>> Steffen
>>
>> --
>> Dr. Steffen Lohmann . Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS)
>> University of Stuttgart . Universitaetstrasse 38 . D-70569 Stuttgart
>> Phone: +49 711 685-88438 .http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~lohmansn
>>

Received on Friday, 9 January 2015 10:14:27 UTC