A Visual Ontology Management System for Handling, Integrating and Enriching Semantic Repositories

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype system for managing ontological data from RDF semantic repositories, via an intuitive, graph-based visual interface. The core of the system provides basic editing functionalities for the managed ontologies, while at the same time allowing for more advanced operations to be plugged-in and applied on them, including the execution of ontology integration algorithms or the enrichment of the ontological knowledge bases via conceptualization mechanisms. The system is able to handle and visualize any ontology accessible from a SPARQL endpoint, and as such could be used to visualize portions of Linked Open Data repositories as well. The prototype has been applied on a case study revolving around a learning application for lawyers within the context of a larger software framework.