Browsing And Visualization Of Semantic Web Content - From Web To The Desktop

Semantic Web technologies make the semantics of information explicit and thus machine processable. The primary aim of these technologies is to fill the semantic gap by sharing and integrating knowledge. Apart from the web, the importance of these technologies has been recognized in other areas like digital libraries, personal information management, user modeling and personalization, e-learning, and e-government, where they are used for explicit, flexible and powerful knowledge representation and new knowledge generation. Primarily designed to be consumed by computers, the proliferation of ontologies and Semantic Web content on the web as well as in other areas has raised the need for direct human interaction in a simple manner. But the inherent limitation of RDF with respect to browsing, the different users' requirements, and the state of the current technology does not allow packaging all the required features into a single universal browser. This paper reports on the state of the art in browsing and visualization of data expressed in RDF/OWL and Topic Map format. The paper identifies different user groups of semantic web content and their browsing and visualization needs, and then evaluates state-of-the-art tools based on those needs. We believe that the efforts of addressing the browsing needs are in the right direction and will help in the transition to the future web.