Flexible approach for user evaluation of biomedical ontologies
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Date
2008
Authors
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Publisher
Makerere University
Abstract
There has been an emergence of various ontologies describing data from either the clinical or biological domains. Associated with this are attempts to develop systems that integrate clinical and biological ontologies using various strategies to overcome issues of scope, differing levels of granularity and conflicting user needs. However, lack of knowledge about user needs for such integration systems, and absence of a general framework to assess their suitability for specific application remain obstacles to their reuse and wide adoption in distributed computing environments. This paper describes a study that aims to address this problem by proposing an evaluation framework for ontology integration to suit user needs. The framework draws on existing ontology evaluation approaches in relating user objectives to ontology characteristics. Systems theory is used to explain the dynamics of a biomedical environment. The framework therefore includes feedbacks from the evaluation process to the user characteristics of the integrated systems. This framework was validated by a study using structured interviews and questionnaires in a survey. The results indicate that it is sufficiently flexible for evaluating ontology based biomedical integrated systems, taking into account the conflicting needs of different users interested in accessing complex libraries of biomedical data.
Description
The article is available full text., Mr. Maiga Gilbert is a part time lecturer at Kampala International University
Keywords
Computing, ICT Research