Tackling Complex Ontologies with AVOnEd — Aspect-Oriented Visual Ontology Editor
Many semantic computing systems use ontologies for knowledge representation and processing. Ontologies come with high degrees of both semantic expressiveness and formalization. They are, however not as widely spread as one would expect, mainly due to the fact that they are complex to handle and to edit. This demo presents a graphical editor for OWL Lite that allows users to interact with complex ontologies using a simple visual notation. It further breaks down complexity by allowing editing parts of ontologies. These partial views are called aspect views as they allow the user to concentrate on the part in question in the context in question. For instance, a person could be shown using different names depending on context (like Superman and Clark Kent). Even though aspects can be visualized and edited independently of each other the editor uses the full ontology to enforce simple constraints such as functional or transitive property definitions and combines the knowledge modeled in all aspects.