Enterprise ontologies allow an organization to come to a shared understanding of the terms and concepts core to their business processes and applications. This consensus can only happen if the ontology can be presented to business users, system developers and other ontologists in a way that each can understand. OWL-based enterprise ontologies are typically large and highly axiomized and present a difficult visualization challenge. The problems of trading off expressiveness with understandability for different audiences can be daunting. By drawing on lessons learned from multiple enterprise ontology projects, this session will present an overview of alternative visualization tools and techniques and will examine which have been most successful in presenting ontologies to different semantic consumers. This will include:
• Graphical visualization alternatives.
• Creating and generating textual definitions.
• Layering semantic detail.
• Transforming ontologies into more familiar modeling formats.