Hannover : Institutionelles Repositorium der Leibniz Universität Hannover
Doi
Abstract
Humans have a curious nature and seek a better understanding of the world. Data, in-
formation, and knowledge became assets of our modern society through the information
technology revolution in the form of the internet. However, with the growing size of
accumulated data, new challenges emerge, such as searching and navigating in these large
collections of data, information, and knowledge. The current developments in academic
and industrial contexts target the corresponding challenges using Semantic Web techno-
logies. The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web and provides machine-readable
representations of knowledge for various domains. These machine-readable representations
allow intelligent machine agents to understand the meaning of the data and information;
and enable additional inference of new knowledge.
Generally, the Semantic Web is designed for information exchange and its processing
and does not focus on presenting such semantically enriched data to humans. Visualizations
support exploration, navigation, and understanding of data by exploiting humans’ ability
to comprehend complex data through visual representations. In the context of Semantic-
Web-Based knowledge structures, various visualization methods and tools are available,
and new ones are being developed every year. However, suitable visualizations are highly
dependent on individual use cases and targeted user groups.
In this thesis, we investigate visual exploration techniques for Semantic-Web-Based
knowledge structures by addressing the following challenges: i) how to engage various user
groups in modeling such semantic representations; ii) how to facilitate understanding using
customizable visual representations; and iii) how to ease the creation of visualizations
for various data sources and different use cases. The achieved results indicate that visual
modeling techniques facilitate the engagement of various user groups in ontology modeling.
Customizable visualizations enable users to adjust visualizations to the current needs and
provide different views on the data. Additionally, customizable visualization pipelines
enable rapid visualization generation for various use cases, data sources, and user group