Visualizing the semantics (not the syntax) of concept descriptions

The development and use of ontologies may require users with no training in formal logic to handle complex concept descriptions (e.g., in the form of necessary conditions in class definitions). To aid such users, alternative representations of concept descriptions have been proposed, such as natural language paraphrases and visualization frameworks. We examine examples of those representations and propose a novel visual framework, where more emphasis is placed on the semantics of concept descriptions than on their syntax.