Investigating Editor Roles in a large-scale Study on WebProtégé Usage Logs

Date: April 28, 2017

Speaker: Patrick Kasper, Graz University of Technology, Austria

Abstract

Collaborative creation and maintenance of ontologies often rely on committed domain experts, rendering these semantic datasets very expensive to develop. Thus, improving the editing performance is an essential component to ensure affordability and continuing proliferation. To provide a unified platform for developing ontologies, the Protégé Team at the Biomedical Informatics Research Group (BMIR) at Stanford University developed WebProtégé - an online tool to collaboratively create, edit, and share biomedical ontologies. The lack of information concerning how the editors actively edit projects deprives developers of the ability make informed improvements to their tools.

Thorough understanding of editing strategies and different editor roles may yield valuable information on how to support ontology editors in their task of building and editing ontologies. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale study where we investigate log data of more than 250 collaboratively developed ontologies using WebProtégé.

We observe and describe 5 distinct editor roles, such as the Class Creator, who concentrates on creating class hierarchies in the ontology-projects, the Class Editor, who edits these classes, and the Individual Editor, who primarily works on named individuals. Moreover, we analyze the distribution of these editor roles across all investigated projects. We firmly believe that our results build a foundation for the development of more personalized or task-oriented interfaces for collaborative ontology-engineering on the WebProtégé.