Visual Analytics

From AgreementMakerWiki

Visual Analytics for Ontology Matching

Ontology matching is a rich research field with potentially huge impact in the life sciences, business applications, and in connecting information on the web. However, ontology matching has become a complicated process that stems from the need to involve several types of matching algorithms that take into account syntactic, lexical, structural, instance, and logic features of the ontologies. The current support provided to users to understand and evaluate the results provided by ontology matching systems is very limited, therefore system configuration is an arduous and time consuming task.

Visual analytics is at the confluence of information visualization, data analytics, and data transformation. This project explores the potential of visual analytics to effectively assist real-time decisions by domain experts and ontology researchers alike during the ontology matching process.

The project is organized around three key research challenges:

Visualization

Data and analytically extracted features need to be encoded into rich visualizations that can be effectively manipulated. In particular, visualizations should lend themselves well to complex transformations that facilitate the discernment of trends or patterns.

Architecture

The interaction between the automatic matching and the visual analytics modules is central to our approach. Our envisioned architecture will support a quality-controlled feedback loop in which users will intervene to change the analytic and visual parameters of the system.

Performance evaluation

We will identify performance measures to objectively identify the obtained gains in terms of the effort saved by users and of the quality of the matching results as enabled by our visual analytics approach to ontology matching.

The broader impact of this project is its contribution to making complex, heterogeneous, and distributed data accessible to an increasing number of users in a variety of domains. Research results, including developed software, will be made available via the project web site (http://agreementmaker.org/wiki/index.php/Visual_Analytics).