Generic environments for knowledge management and visualization

There is an increasing need for usable tools to support knowledge elicitation, formalization and management. As an answer to this need, this paper describes fully integrated semantic web frameworks, where users can represent and manage their knowledge in a visual way, without the need of semantic web experts as intermediaries. These frameworks typically incorporate an ontology editor, a resource editor, reasoning capabilities and intuitive interaction and visualization facilities. In particular, two frameworks are presented: IRCS, a system to semantically index, search, and navigate heterogeneous resources, and AWI, a collaborative environment aiming to collect and share knowledge of user communities. These generic frameworks were developed within applied research projects and used to create semantic web applications in different domains such as water management plants and business process management. An interesting aspect of these systems is that they provide visualization tools to present both ontologies and resources in a familiar and intuitive way in order to simplify their understanding. The use of effective visualization techniques is also investigated in the EasyOnto project, where a web application that graphically represents ontologies using different methods was developed.