[seek-kr-sms] Big Fat Graphs (BFGs) and GrOWL

Laura L. Downey ldowney at lternet.edu
Fri Nov 10 12:57:52 PST 2006


At the semantic web user interaction workshop I recently attended the idea
of big fat graphs (graphical representations of ontologies) was challenged.
And in fact in one of the papers by David Karger and m.c. schraefel they
flat out took the position that they are pretty much unusable by most people
and that is why we don't see them in lots of applications like we do lists
and tree views.  They did allow that in very specific instances they might
be useful and in this case that might be for the very small set of knowledge
engineers that understand the complexity of ontologies and that trees are
not true representations.  However, they argued that for regular users,
presenting huge graphs to people is not usable and in fact could be
intimidating and confusing and there was quite a bit of audience agreement
with this.  Lots of people had wondered into the workshop from the
conference during some of our talks at the workshop that day.  The position
paper can be found here:

http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Karger/Pathetic_Fallacy.html

 

That said, there was also a research paper presented that touted adding some
features to a "big fat graph" that might indeed made it much more usable and
they compared this to GrOWL and in fact GrOWL is mentioned in their paper
but more in that they are saying their application is much better.  I sort
of challenged them on this in the follow on questions but didn't really get
a reasonable answer that I understood.  There are several features in GrOWL
and this other application that I'm not familiar with but I wanted to bring
this to the attention of our GrOWL people.  The paper is called Interactive
Visualization of Large OWL Instance sets and can be found at:
http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Noppens/Noppens.pdf

 

Laura L. Downey
Senior Usability Engineer
LTER Network Office
Department of Biology, MSC03 2020
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM  87131-0001
505.277.3157 office

505.610.9657 mobile

505.277-2541 fax
ldowney at lternet.edu

 

 

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