Ontology Exploration through Logical Views in Protégé

Ontology exploration or modelling becomes a challenging task when knowledge domains are huge and involve many relationships and restrictions. In such circumstances the ability to inspect and modify only specific parts of a given model may enable designers to achieve better results, by focusing on limited subsets of the domain. The work proposed in this paper extends a visualization plug-in for Protege (Ontosphere3d) with so-called "Logical Views" in order to provide an explicit support for visualizing and modelling subsets of a given knowledge domain. We intend a logical view as a user-definable set of ontology entities (concepts and relations) having in common a so-called subject area. Once defined, logical views can be stored inside the ontology model inform of annotation properties; as a consequence the view definition is completely independent from the tool employed for its creation and can be easily ported to different platforms and development environments.