Developing Protégé Plug-in: OWL Ontology Visualization using Social Network

In recent years, numerous studies have been attempted to exploit ontology in the area of ubiquitous computing. Especially, some kinds of ontologies written in OWL are proposed for major issues in ubiquitous computing such like context-awareness. OWL is recommended by W3C as a descriptive language for representing ontology with rich vocabularies. However, developers struggle to design ontology using OWL, because of the complex syntax of OWL. The research for OWL visualization aims to overcome this problem, but most of the existing approaches unfortunately do not provide efficient interface to visualize OWL ontology. Moreover, as the size of ontology grows bigger, each class and relation are difficult to represent on the editing window due to the small size limitation of screen. In this paper, we present OWL visualization scheme that supports class information in detail. This scheme is based on concept of social network, and we implement OWL visualization plug-in on Protégé that is the most famous ontology editor.