Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Visualizing the taxonomy

A thread in a SLA Taxonomy discussion group points to visualization tools for modelling a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary.

Prefuse.org - Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. "

Mind mapping can help. Some tools are:

- XMind> - very versatile tool - use it for brainstorming, or creating topic maps.

- MindJet / MindManager - FreeMind
- NovaMind
- iMindMap

- VisualMind - mind mapping with import / export and search functions.

-The Brain
- MindMeister

If building an ontology is the aim, Knoodl "facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases"

Or TopBraid from TopQuadrant - they say of their product - ""the world's most powerful graphical development environment for modelling data, connecting data sources, and designing queries, rules and semantic data processing chains."

1 comment:

Michael Douma said...

An additional tool is SpicyNodes (www.spicynodes.org), which can be useful to visualize a hierarchy. The input is an XML file, or can be manually created using a drag and drop interface. Also, can import freemind files.