Effective Visualisations of Large Ontologies and Associations

Ontologies are structured vocabularies for organising domain knowledge, and are widely used in biological and biomedical research. They frequently contain thousands of terms and are arranged hierarchically with numerous non-hierarchical associations between terms. Ontology users and developers need to understand combinations of associations that are distributed across the hierarchy—a task which is not well supported by existing tools. This thesis presents a new approach for interactive visualisation of associations within ontologies. It employs visual compression techniques and novel visual representations to facilitate effective ontology exploration and analysis. These techniques are implemented in the web-based system OntoPlot.