Visualizing ontologies with VOWL

Visualizations can be very useful when working with ontologies. The Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL) is a comprehensive and well-specified visual language for the user-oriented representation of ontologies. It defines graphical depictions for most elements of the OWL Web Ontology Language that are combined to a force-directed graph layout visualizing the ontology. In contrast to related work, VOWL aims for an intuitive representation that is also understandable to users less familiar with ontologies. This article presents VOWL in detail and describes its implementation in two different tools: ProtégéVOWL and WebVOWL. The first is a plugin for the ontology editor Protégé, the second a standalone application entirely based on open web standards. Both tools demonstrate the applicability of VOWL by means of various ontologies. In addition, the results of three user studies conducted to evaluate the comprehensibility and usability of VOWL are summarized. They are complemented by latest insights gained from an expert interview and from testing the visual scope and completeness of VOWL with a benchmark ontology. The evaluations helped to improve VOWL and confirm that it creates comparatively intuitive and usable ontology visualizations.