Monday, December 22, 2008

Hyperbolic Tree Visualization

Ever since I first read about the Javascript Information Visualization (JIT) toolkit, a javascript library that renders hyperbolic tree's and other visualizations directly inside HTML (canvas element), I've wanted to try and integrate that functionality with some jOWL reasoning.
I finally found some time to do that.
Turns out integrating jOWL data with the JIT Hyperbolic tree visualization is a walk in the park. I had the basic example up and running in less than an hour.
Not in the least thanks to JIT library itself and the great documentation on the site.


The result is a quite cool ontology view. It's a nice gimmick, but for most purposes, a regular jOWL treeview will provide a better oversight in my opinion. It should be fairly easy to expand and smoothen out the functionality of that demo. Linking the visualization to existing jOWL components should only require a few lines of code.
I did not put the effort in that for the moment, as I am currently working on a bigger jOWL-related project.



You can see the demo at: HyperBolic Tree demo, it is best viewed in Firefox or Safari, due to Internet Explorer's refusal to adopt the canvas tag (although it will work on Internet Explorer as well, but slower).

No comments: