EROS: explorer for RDFS-based ontologies

1. THE CHALLENGE IN VISUALIZING RDFS-BASED ONTOLOGIES RDFS is an acknowledged backbone of the Semantic Web architecture. Browsing and querying RDFS-based ontologies is becoming a characteristic (user) activity in Semantic Web applications. We argue that due to peculiarities of the RDFS language a new interface is needed to convey RDFS-based ontologies to the end-user in a comprehensible form. The two main approaches currently used, the tree-based approach and the graph-based approach, do not fulfill the above requirement completely. The tree paradigm does not help the user in grasping other concept relationships than that used to construct the tree structure (most of the time being the rdfs:subClassOf relationship). The graph approach, on the other hand, displays all concept relationships but as a result introduces the full complexity of a directed labeled graph in which it is very difficult to spot the hierarchical structure of the ontology “hidden” behind the special kind of edges.