What Can the Ontology Describe? Visualizing Local Coverage in PURO Modeler

Ontologies and vocabularies written in OWL are a crucial part of the semantic web. OWL however allows to model the same part of reality using different combinations of constructs, constituting ‘modeling styles’. Comparing how different ontologies from a similar domain cover a specific part of reality might be more difficult when each ontology uses a different style. PURO, a language for ontological background models, can serve as mediator, as it allows to create models that are directly mappable to OWL but overcome its unnatural modeling limits dictated by description logic. By highlighting the parts of the PURO model covered by particular ontologies, the ontology coverage comparison can be visualized. We demonstrate this approach using a simple graphical tool.