Visual Displays for Browsing RDF Documents

Introduction Hyperbolic browsers are motivated by the "Circle Limit IV" woodcut of M.C. Escher. The hyperbolic tree view was introduced in graph drawing by Lamping and Rao [2] who observed that large structures could be compactly displayed by projecting a tree onto a hyperbolic plane. The effect of the projection is that components appear diminishing in size and radius exponentially the further they move from the centre of the diagram. The arguments for the hyperbolic display are twofold: an order of magnitude more nodes of a tree can be rendered in the same display space and the focus is maintained on the central vertex of the display and its immediate neighbourhood. The hyperbolic view is particularly useful for hierarchical diagrams with large numbers of leaves and branches and where neighbourhood relationships are meaningful. Examples of the hyperbolic view are INXIGHT's Star Tree and HYPERPROF . Given that the pure hyperbolic geometric projection is patented, projection on