VOWL: Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies
Abstract:
The Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies (VOWL) defines a visual language for the user-oriented representation of ontologies. It provides graphical depictions for elements of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that are combined to a force-directed graph layout visualizing the ontology.
This specification focuses on the visualization of the ontology schema (i.e. the classes, properties and datatypes, sometimes called TBox), while it also includes recommendations on how to depict individuals and data values (the ABox). Familiarity with OWL and other Semantic Web technologies is required to understand this specification.
At the end of the specification there is an interesting example but as a “force-directed graph layout” it captures one of the difficulties I have with that approach.
I have this unreasonable notion that a node I select and place in the display should stay where I have placed it, not shift about because I have moved some other node. Quite annoying and I don’t find it helpful at all.
I first saw this at: VOWL: Visual Notation for OWL Ontologies