Ontology Reuse and Exploration via Interactive Graph Manipulation

Reusing ontologies can significantly accelerate the development of new ontologies, and therefore interoperability. However, reuse of ontologies calls for efficient means to identify reusable parts within and across existing ontologies. This paper presents a novel, graphical user interface to explore semantic overlaps between ontologies in order to identify parts for knowledge reuse. Existing tools typically only compare pairs of ontologies. Our approach allows for exploring concept mapping links across arbitrarily many ontologies, represented as so-called hyperontology graphs. To cope with the inherent complexity of such graphs, we allow for a variety of information hiding techniques tailored to specific exploration tasks. By manipulating the hyperontology graph interactively the user can refine the concept mapping network to his needs. Finally, we show how the resulting graph can be used to automatically synthesise a new ontology by extracting the corresponding modules and merging them appropriately.