Knoocks: New Visualization Approach for Ontologies

Ontologies are becoming popular in various communities. They give users the possibilities to understand, exchange, analyze or share knowledge of a specific domain. However ontologies can be very large and complex and therefore visualizations should help the user to understand and manipulate ontologies easily. Most visualizations concentrate on the structure of ontologies. For users, instances are often more interesting, because they represent the real world objects. This paper presents Knoocks (knowledge blocks) as a visualization approach which focuses on instances related to their structure. An evaluation which compared Knoocks with Jambalaya and CropCircles showed its benefits in visualizing instances.