a hobbit The FRODO RDFSViz Tool DFKI logo

The FRODO RDFSViz tool provides a visualization service for ontologies represented in RDF Schema.
It uses the Java RDF API implementation (Sergey Melnik), the Xerces XML parser from xml.apache.org, and the Graphviz graph drawing program (AT&T and Lucent Bell Labs).

The tool creates class diagrams where classes become nodes and rdfs:subClassOf relations become edges. Optionally, properties with rdfs:Class-valued ranges are also visualized as (labeled) edges. Properties (incl. rdfs:Literal-valued ones) can be displayed as node contents.

If you want to visualize general RDF models, you may use the RDF graph visualization tools W3C RDF Validation Service (W3C) or Rudolf RDFViz (Dan Brickley). DAML+OIL ontologies can be visualized with the DAML+OIL servlet which is part of TRIPLE.

A tool similar to RDFSViz is the OntoViz plugin for the knowledge acqusition tool Protégé-2000 (which is also an RDF[S] editor). OntoViz is much more configurable than RDFSViz and allows, e.g., the selection of sub-ontologies to be visualized.

The FRODO RDFSViz tool was implemented in the FRODO project (A Framework for Distributed Organizational Memories) at DFKI Kaiserslautern (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence).

News and Status

2001-08-17    optional display of (class and literal-valued) properties as node contents
2001-05-28    aspect ratio added
2000-09-22    first binary & source distribution
2000-09-21    RDFS namespace can be selected
2000-09-15    some minor namespace problems solved
2000-09-13    initial version made available as online demo (Java servlet)

Examples

Online Demo

Enter a URL of your RDF Schema file:
   
RDF Schema namespace (must be specified!):   help
show non-literal properties    hide literal-valued properties   help
show namespaces?  show schema nodes?   help
node color: node background color: ISA edge color: property edge color:   help
use aspect ratio (height:width)  (max: 10; min: 0.1)   help
Print additional information   help
dot tool version to use:   help
result output format

Bugs and Improvements

If you find any bugs or have ideas for improvements, please let us know:
Michael Sintek and Andreas Lauer

Known problems

Download

Old RDFSViz binaries




Changed 9-Mar-02 - Michael Sintek - sintek@dfki.uni-kl.de