A Comparative Study of Four Ontology Visualization Techniques in Protege: Experiment Setup and Preliminary Results

The continuing need for more effective information retrieval has lead to the creation of the notions of the semantic web and personalized information management, areas of study that very often employ ontologies to represent the semantic context of a domain. Consequently, the need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing has arisen. There are several ontology visualizations available through the existing ontology management tools, but not as many evaluations to determine their advantages and disadvantages and their suitability for various ontologies and user groups. This work presents the preliminary results of an evaluation of four visualization methods in Protege.