Towards a Visualisation Process for
         Ontology-Based Conceptual Modelling?

Germán Braun1,3 , Christian Gimenez1 , Laura Cecchi1 , and Pablo Fillottrani2,4
                       1
                          Universidad Nacional del Comahue
                           2
                             Universidad Nacional del Sur
       3
         Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas y Técnicas (CONICET)
    4
      Comisión de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas de la provincia de Buenos Aires (CIC)

    Visualisation of models by means of graphical representations plays an es-
sential role in tools. It assists users to understand them, relate their concepts
and generate explicit, better usable and communicable knowledge. Additionally,
it helps to perceive properties and patterns that have not previously been cap-
tured, identify problems about data and focus our attention on the domain being
modelled. Moreover, diagrams can lead to great insights or consequences, but
also lack of them that can be hidden to users in complex diagrams, causing in-
consistencies and anomalies. Hence, equipping CASE (Computer-aided software
engineering) tools with capabilities for automatically exploring, composing and
checking models is highly desirable.
    In this respect, we introduce the concept of knowledge visualisation pro-
cess for ontology-based conceptual modelling. This process defines a computer-
supported transformation of ontological facts or concepts, possibly extracted
from data, into insights by means of graphical-logical mappings. Its aim is to
capture domain knowledge, understand it by discovering relationships, patterns,
anomalies and explanations, and communicate it suitably among users. Such a
process focuses on the following main objectives. First, the integration of visual
representations and logic-based reasoning capabilities, which is still incipient in
state-of-the-art environments and whose formalisation has been already defined
in our previous works. Second, the definition of what is relevant to be and how
should be visualised. Lastly, the usage of graphical representations as a source
to evaluate the quality of models and their correspondence with the domain
being modelled. Our concrete proposals are both a schematic view and initial
baselines of the knowledge visualisation process to be implemented into a tool.
Currently, we are developing such a tool supporting this process, in addition to
a methodology for ontology evolution with pattern-based extension rules and
an ontology-based metamodel. We expect to release this tool for the UML,
EER and ORM models together with their corresponding DL formalisations
and metamodel-based mapping rules to link and convert them to each other.




?
    This paper has been accepted at the Brazilian Ontology Research Seminar
    (ONTOBRAS 2016) held in Curitiba, Brasil. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1862/