Social network analysis (the analysis of relationships between actors in a network) has been a very active research field in the last few decades. Most concepts involved in social network analysis are found in sociology. Recent work, however, has demonstrated the value of social network analysis in various disciplines. This paper presents a tool, OntoVis, for visualizing heterogeneous social networks using information stored in an ontology. In this context, nodes represent concepts, and links represent relations between concepts.

The paper is divided into two main sections. The first presents the most important concepts and the main techniques of OntoVis. The most original contribution of this tool is the use of both structural and semantic abstraction, using, respectively, topological information and an ontology graph. Statistical measures are also applied, to reduce the size of the graph. The second section presents two case studies, using concepts and relations from the movie domain and the security domain, demonstrating the value of OntoVis for the visual analysis of large heterogeneous networks.

Overall, this paper presents an interesting tool for the visual analysis of large heterogeneous social networks using both semantic and structural abstraction. Everyone concerned with social network analysis and the use of ontologies should be interested in this work.