AIC Seminar Series

Ontologies provide powerful and concise conceptualizations of domain knowledge that must be machine-processable but also human-readable to improve ease of use and also to ease communication across stakeholders. To address the human-readable requirement, many visualization tools have been designed for specific tasks such as finding pertinent terms for data annotation or ontology alignment. However, customizing these tools for other tasks is either impossible or difficult to do without programming. Moreover, few of the existing ontology visualization tools consider collaborative aspects and most cannot be deployed easily over the web which may hamper their adoption and collaboration opportunities. To address these shortcomings, we designed a web-based collaborative ontology visualization tool called BioMixer. BioMixer provides users with sharable workspaces and embeddable visualizations that can be seamlessly inserted into external websites. It provides a variety of customizable visualization approaches that can be quickly combined and coordinated for visualizing ontologies, ontology mappings and annotated data. In this talk, I will first provide an historical perspective on ontology visualization tools, the tasks they support and their limitations. Next, I will demonstrate the BioMixer tool and review its underlying requirements. Finally, I will present some preliminary feedback on BioMixer and discuss remaining research challenges in the design of cognitive and collaboration support for future ontology editors and tools.

Margaret-Anne Storey is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto, a Canada Research Chair in Human Computer Interaction for Software Engineering and a principal investigator for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, US. Her research goal is to understand how technology can help people explore, understand and share complex information and knowledge. She applies and evaluates techniques from knowledge engineering, social software and visual interface design to applications such as biomedical ontology development, collaborative software development and learning in web-based environments.

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