OntoSELF was recently developed to provide 3D visualization of the underlying hierarchical structure of intensional ontologies. The extensions to OntoSELF focus on enhancing perception and facilitating high-level comprehension as well as low-level detail exploiting. The extensions
include various visualization cues to enhance visualization perception, processing user-defined relationships in addition to the standard hierarchical IS-A relationship, user filtering on which relationships to include in the visualization, and social network analysis (SNA) metrics for
additional filtering and structuring criteria, and for finding and better understanding important concepts of interest.
To use standard social network analysis (SNA) techniques, a preprocessing algorithm is used to project an m-mode n-plex ontology structure to a 1-mode 1-plex sociomatrix. A high-level abstraction algorithm based on the notion of "communities of interest" is provided to simplify the social network view of the ontology to a higher level of abstraction.