Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

Towards Bioinformatics Resourceomes 29
hard task. Besides this, also the availability of tools for knowledge visualization
will undoubtedly helps knowledge understanding and sharing. The huge
amount of scientific knowledge needs not only to be machine understandable,
but also to be visualized through intuitive graphical representations, like e.g.
through an interactive browser. Therefore new tools are required for translating
the coded knowledge in a form easily digestible for scientists. With
this aim we implemented a prototype of a Semantic Web browser for Resourceomes
22 (Figure 6). The browser, being coded as Java applet on a Web
page, can be accessed from every common Web browser.
Fig. 6. The Semantic Web browser for Resourceomes
On the left panel of the browser it is possible to expand and collapse the
resource ontology. Through the selection of one or more of its concepts it is
possible to choose the types of resources to visualize. Pressing the button
“SHOW DOMAIN VIEW”, on the upper part of the right panel will be
visualized the part of the domain ontology containing the concepts to which
the previously chosen resources are related. Besides the domain ontology
portion, also resources instances are shown. They are connected through an
arrow to the topic/s of the domain to which they refer to. Customizable
icons are used to represent different kinds of resources, e. g. the pdf logo for
the papers and a cylinder for databases. The resource instances of the types
previously chosen can be visualized in the lower part of the left panel by
pressing the button “SHOW INSTANCE TREE”. The resources appear as
22 http://resourceome.cs.unicam.it:8080/resourceome/resourceomeweb.html