Inspecting Concepts Graphically with Zoomable Lenses

This paper proposes a novel interactive tool de- signed to support the graphical inspection of large semantic models. The idea is to view the itera- tive inspection process as a series of recurring and cross-referencing model interrogations. Our tool employs movable lens filters (SFB94) as primitive interrogation units. Each lens is associated with a single operation, such as querying, result visualisa- tion or filtering. A variety of complex queries and visualisation mappings can be constructed by su- perimposing the lenses. This paper describes the design and the anticipated benefits of the tool, with examples taken from the GRAIL medical terminol- ogy model, an extensive system currently contain- ing around 8000 concepts.