Human visual consistency-checking in the real world ontologies

Solving complex consistency checking tasks in natural languages is hard and requires sophisticated specialist expertise. The similar task of finding bugs in information systems can be large-scale and is often conducted with some visualisation of the data. Visualisation, therefore, could also be a useful tool when consistency checking in real world applications, such as in the case of ontology engineering. Previous experiments suggest that node-link visualisation, such as SOVA, are more effective than node-link-region visualisation, such as concept diagrams, in consistency checking tasks. In this study, we found that this tendency was not affected even in an alternative setting where multiple concept diagrams were used. Our findings have implications for the way in which information is presented visually: single (merged) visualisations are effective for these types of tasks.