Jambalaya: Interactive visualization to enhance ontology authoring and knowledge acquisition in Protégé

This paper describes the integration of an interactive visualization user interface with a knowledge management tool called Protégé. Protégé is a general-purpose tool that allows domain experts to build knowledge-based systems by creating and modifying reusable ontologies and problem-solving methods, and by instantiating ontologies to construct knowledge bases. The SHriMP (Simple Hierarchical Multi-Perspective) visualization technique was designed to enhance how people browse, explore and interact with complex information spaces. Although SHriMP is information independent, its primary use to date has been for visualizing and documenting software programs. The paper describes how we have applied software visualization techniques to more general knowledge domains. It is hoped that the integrated environment (called Jambalaya) will result in an easier to use and more powerful environment to support ontology evolution and knowledge acquisition. An example scenario of how Jambalaya can be applied to knowledge acquisition is provided.