Extracting and Analyzing Sequential Interaction-Patterns in Ontology-Engineering Projects and BioPortal

Date: July 22, 2016

Speaker: Simon Walk, Graz University of Technology, Austria

Abstract

Over the last decade, ontologies have become the mainstay in the biomedical domain. Their size and complexity, as well as, the required expert domain knowledge to create these ontologies have increased significantly. In addition, many projects resort to collaborative approaches for building these ontologies, using the Internet as a cooperation platform. While online collaborative projects have become common, the processes that drive these collaborations are still not well understood and represent a fairly new field of research, with many (un)known and yet unexplored and unresolved problems associated with it. For example, the quality of an ontology is typically evaluated only by assessing the resulting ontology itself (e.g., by comparing it against a golden standard or by assessing its performance for a specific predetermined task). However, the intricate and dynamic (social) processes that occur when users collaboratively engineer an ontology (or seek specific pieces of information in online ontology repositories), provide an additional source of information, which should be included in the quality assessment processes. In particular, I will present several analyses about how Markov chains can be used to extract, analyze and model regularities and (sequential) patterns from the logs of interactions of several collaborative ontology-engineering projects as well as online ontology repositories, such as BioPortal.

References

• S. Walk, P. Singer, M. Strohmaier, D. Helic, N. F. Noy and M. A. Musen (2015). How to apply Markov chains for modeling sequential edit patterns in collaborative ontology-engineering projects. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 84, 51-66.PDF: http://www.simonwalk.info/documents/2015_ijhcs_how_to_apply_markov_chains.pdf
• S. Walk, P. Singer, M. Strohmaier, T. Tudorache, M. A. Musen and N. F. Noy (2014). Discovering Beaten Paths in Collaborative Ontology-Engineering Projects Using Markov Chains. Journal of biomedical informatics 51, 254-271. PDF: http://www.simonwalk.info/documents/2014_jbi_medical_paths.pdf
• S. Walk, P. Singer, L. E. Noboa, T. Tudorache, M. A. Musen and M. Strohmaier (2015). Understanding How Users Edit Ontologies: Comparing Hypotheses About Four Real-World Projects. The Semantic Web-ISWC 2015, 551-568. PDF: http://www.simonwalk.info/documents/2015_iswc2015_ontotrails.pdf