Virtual Reality Ontology Object Manipulation (VROOM)

Biomedical ontologies are considered important repositories of knowledge about the medical domain and related fields. They are best thought of as node-link networks, where each node represents one single (medical) concept and links express binary relationships between pairs of concepts. The most important relationship ("IS-A") is used to form a generalization hierarchy among the concepts. Visualizing and manipulating such a network when it includes more than a few hundred nodes can be challenging. This paper presents a new system called VROOM (Virtual Reality Ontology Object Manipulation) that supports browsing and interaction with a biomedical ontology in a virtual 3-D space, enabling more natural and realistic interaction with and navigation through the ontology network.