Protg4US: Harvesting Ontology Authoring Data with Protg
Markel Vigo, Caroline Jay, Robert Stevens · 2014
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. Prot�g�) is used. To do so, we build Prot�g�4US (Prot�g� for User Studies) by extending Prot�g� 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 Prot�g�4US with a case study with 15 participants. The data generated from the study allows us to know more about how Prot�g� 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 Prot�g�4US is an valuable instrument to identify ontology authoring patterns.