Visualization of Complex Relations in E-government Knowledge Taxonomies

The successful collaboration and interoperability between fully and partially related E-government subject domains requires well understood and high quality definitions of terms and a unified view of the relationships between the defined terms. The common terms and corresponding relation are defined in knowledge taxonomies (or even ontologies) and several good tools exist to create and maintain these models for the appropriate sub domains. The engineering process is carried out in a multi-user environment including remote workers editing the taxonomy. However, the sheer complexity and size of the full models dictates more powerful and dedicated visualization tools to graphically inspect, assess and diagnose the full taxonomies. This article describes a case where a social network analysis (SNA) tool is used as a part of a regime for the quality assurance of a knowledge taxonomy for e-government interoperability. In addition to the visual aids provided by the SNA tool, some comments are also made as to the applicability of SNA centrality metrics to knowledge taxonomies.