Ontology Visualization: An Overview

As the main way for knowledge representation for the purpose of completely machine understanding, ontologies are widely used in different application domains. This full machine understanding makes them harder to be easily understood by a human. This necessitates the need to develop ontology visualization tools, which results in the existence of a large number of approaches and visualization tools. Along with this development direction, the number of published research papers related to ontology visualization is largely increasing. To this end, in this paper, we introduce a systemic review on different directions related to ontology visualization. In particular, we start by describing different application domains that make use of ontology visualization. Then, we propose a generic visualization pipeline that incorporates main steps in ontology visualization that could be later used as main criteria during comparing and discussing different visualization tools. By this review, we aim to introduce a general visualization pipeline that is useful when comparing ontology visualization tools and when developing a new visualization technique. Finally, the paper moves into the description of future trends and research issues that still need to be addressed.