User-friendly ontology editing and visualization tools: the OWLeasyViz approach

This paper aims to propose solutions to the issue of ontology visualization, by presenting intuitive and user-friendly ontology editing and visualization environments mainly oriented to domain experts. It starts with an overview of existing ontology visualization methods,. afterwards it describes the Semantic DB system and the OWLeasyViz ontology editor. Semantic DB is a web application framework to create simple complete semantic web applications, integrating an ontology editor, a resource editor, an inference rule editor, a reasoner, and a search engine. OWLeasyViz is an ontology editor that combines a textual and a graphical representation of OWL ontologies. It meets different user needs by providing a simple and intuitive interface to end-users who are not ontologists, and offering more advanced tools to ontology experts. The OWLeasyViz editor is intended to be a module of a semantic web integrated working environment, developed within the context of a Swiss Government funded CTI applied research project in the domain of waste water management.