Visualization of AGROVOC

Gagandeep SinghPrabhakar TV

Chatterjee JayantaWith acknowledgement to MD Singh

The problem

• AGROVOC is very big• 200,000 terms and 150,000 relationships -

10 languages• How do I demonstrate it to an agricultural

scientist?• Text based browsing sucks• Visualization might help

Existing tools

• Not very happy with what they do/show• Wanted to do our own �

Depth first traversal of Agrovocusing H3

Visualization of the whole of AGROVOC using H3

Types of relationships in AGROVOC

• Equivalence: Used to denote interchangeability in use. Examples are: Use and Used For.

• Hierarchical: Used to denote superclass-subclass structure or “is-a” relationships. Examples are: Narrower Term, Broader Term

• Associative: Used to show association (besides the two kinds above) between terms. Examples are: Related Term

• Apart from these, to disambiguate things there are scope notes also. Scope notes maybe a definition of a term, a history note, instructions to the indexer or searcher, or simply a comment.

AGROVOC Browsing

• AGROVOC is top heavy – many terms with no broader term

• Typically neighborhood is of interest – 1-neighborhood

• Multiple languages

Neighborhood around Maize term

A concept map about Bond Chemistry drawn manually

The same concept map drawn by the Firefox extension

Our Approach

• Based on Fruchterman-Reingold approach.• The nodes are modeled as charged particles and the

edges are modeled as springs. • Forces due to these are calculated using the laws of

physics. • On each iteration, the nodes are moved a distance

proportional to the force being exerted on them. • uses cooling schedules based on the degree of a node.

The more connected the node, the lower is its temperature and the greater the inertia to move.

• Our method is universally applicable since we consider only a 1-distance neighborhood of the node.

Our browser

• Data in MySQL• Over a web-service connected to FAO• Also as a Firefox plugin

The architecture of the generic ontology viewer

A snapshot of the tool in action

• Demo

What else?

• addition, deletion and modification of nodes, edges, tags etc. A tool with these capabilities can help ease the creation and maintenance of existing ontologies.

• a complete authoring environment by allowing multiple users to visually make changes to an ontology and the same changes being committed back to a central repository.

• Icon repository, so that appropriate icons can be displayed for each term.

Thank you