Visualisation of ontological inferences for user control of personal Web agents

We describe a visualisation tool, VlUM, designed to support users in scrutinising models of their interests, preferences and knowledge. We also describe MECUREO, a tool for building lightweight ontologies from online dictionaries. It enables a user to see a model describing both their interests and additional analogically inferred interests. We report a small qualitative evaluation of this combined system. This indicates that users were able to use the system to explore models of two hypothetical users, making use of varying levels of ontological inference.