Protege4US: Harvesting Ontology Authoring Data with Protege

摘要

The inherent complexity of ontologies poses a number of cognitive and perceptual challenges for ontology authors. We investigate how-users deal with the complexity of the authoring process by analysing how one of the most widespread ontology development tools (i.e. Protege) is used. To do so, we build Protege4US (Prote'ge for User Studies) by extending Protege in order to generate log files that contain ontology authoring events. These log files not only contain data about the interaction with the environment, but also about OWL entities and axioms. We illustrate the usefulness of Protege4US with a case study with 15 participants. The data generated from the study allows us to know more about how Protege is used (e.g. most frequently used tabs), how well users perform (e.g. task completion times) and identify emergent authoring strategies, including moving down the class hierarchy or saving the current workspace before running the reasoner. We argue that Protege4US is an valuable instrument to identify ontology authoring patterns.