Design and evaluation of a panoramic visualization environment on Semantic Web

Information visualization has been popularly applied to the Semantic Web to facilitate the presentation of data semantics. Since, the past visualization interfaces, based either on RDF or on Topic Maps, only present a partial view of the Semantic Web space, an integrated view would be needed to demonstrate the panorama and help users access the Semantic Web resources. We have presented an Integrated Semantic Web interactive visualization environment (ISWIVE) to incorporate topic features from Topic Maps into RDF, and showed that both the detailed resource descriptions and the overall topic relationships can be clearly visualized. In this paper, we present an improved ISWIVE interface that provides a mixed-model visualization in a clearer layout and supports a concurrent display of both RDF and Topic Maps views. Quantitative analyses were conducted to show the enhancement of the improved ISWIVE interface and the differences between the textual interface and the original ISWIVE prototype.