Masters Thesis Defense “Automated Rendering of Schema Diagram for Ontologies” By Nazifa Karima

Committee:  Drs. Pascal Hitzler, Advisor, Adila A. Krisnadhi, and Tanvi Banerjee

ABSTRACT:

Semantic Web extends the current web, using ontologies, metadata and other technologies to establish links between terms and concepts.  This enables machines to automatically integrate information across different platforms utilizing the standard definitions.  Furthermore, reasoning agents can infer new knowledge by gathering existing information and these additional connections between them.  As a result of being designed and maintained independently, data sources exhibit highly heterogeneous nature.  This increases the complexity of data integration and hinders interoperability.  However, if we can align the overlapping concepts among different domains of knowledge, the prospect of achieving interoperability and integration without having any intermediate reasoning agent, can be extremely valuable.  But reusing ontologies is a practice that requires significant human effort by itself [9].  It takes crucial amount of endeavor on Ontology Engineers’ part to understand an existing ontology and figure out an appropriate domain for reuse.  Being able to consult good documentations and clear schema diagrams, contributes largely in favor of this pursuit[4].  In this paper, we described the development of a light-weight tool that automatically produces a schema diagram from a given ontology.  We have evaluated our work comparing with the standard diagrams available in existing literature.  Also, we matched our results with the visualization yielded by a widely used visualization tool VOWL.  In the end, we presented a comparative discussion between the different approaches conceived by these two tools and compared their efficacy.