OntoMirror: A New Ontology Visualization Tool with a Metric Calculator and a Pitfall Scanner

An ontology provides formal, machine readable and human interpretable repre- sentations of a domain knowledge. Therefore, ontology based knowledge man- agement has received a lot of attention with the rise of the Semantic Web. People who want to use these ontologies need an understanding, but it is very difficult if the ontology reader lacks background knowledge necessary to comprehend the ontology or the size of the ontology is very huge. It was within this context that the need arose for software tools that facilitate the understanding of ontologies. Ontology visualization is an important research area because visualization can help in development, exploration, verification, and comprehension of ontologies. This paper introduces the design of a new ontology visualization tool, which differs from the traditional visualization tools in the manner that it gives some important metrics and analytics about the ontology concepts and warns the ontology developer about potential ontology design errors. The tool has also some advantages in terms of speed and readability. It is clearly visible that these additional functionalities will increase the value added by the traditional ontology visualization tools during the ontology exploration and evaluation.