Visualization of Semantic Metadata and Ontologies

Implicit information embedded in semantic web graphs, such as topography, clusters, and disconnected subgraphs is difficult to extract from text files. Visualizations of the graphs can reveal some of these features, but existing systems for visualizing metadata focus on aspects other than understanding the greater structure. In this paper, we present a tool for generating visualizations of ontologies and metadata by using a modified spring embedder to achieve an automatic layout. Through a case study using a mid-sized ontology, we show that interesting information about the data relationships can be extracted through our visualization of the physical graph structure.