TY - GEN
T1 - The Efficacy of OWL and DL on User Understanding of Axioms and Their Entailments
AU - Alharbi, Eisa
AU - Howse, John
AU - Stapleton, Gem
AU - Hamie, Ali
AU - Touloumis, Anestis
N1 - The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68288-4_2
PY - 2017/10/4
Y1 - 2017/10/4
N2 - OWL is recognized as the de facto standard notation for on- tology engineering. The Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS) was developed as an alternative to symbolic description logic (DL) and it is believed to be more eective for users. This paper sets out to test that belief from two perspectives by evaluating how accurately and quickly people understand the informational content of axioms and derive inferences from them. By conducting a between-group empirical study, involving 60 novice participants, we found that DL is just as eective as MOS for people's understanding of axioms. Moreover, for two types of inference problems, DL supported signi cantly better task performance than MOS, yet MOS never signi cantly outperformed DL. These surprising results suggest that the belief that MOS is more eective than DL, at least for these types of task, is unfounded. An outcome of this research is the suggestion that ontology axioms, when presented to non experts, may be better presented in DL rather than MOS. Further empirical studies are needed to explain these unexpected results and to see whether they hold for other types of task.
AB - OWL is recognized as the de facto standard notation for on- tology engineering. The Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS) was developed as an alternative to symbolic description logic (DL) and it is believed to be more eective for users. This paper sets out to test that belief from two perspectives by evaluating how accurately and quickly people understand the informational content of axioms and derive inferences from them. By conducting a between-group empirical study, involving 60 novice participants, we found that DL is just as eective as MOS for people's understanding of axioms. Moreover, for two types of inference problems, DL supported signi cantly better task performance than MOS, yet MOS never signi cantly outperformed DL. These surprising results suggest that the belief that MOS is more eective than DL, at least for these types of task, is unfounded. An outcome of this research is the suggestion that ontology axioms, when presented to non experts, may be better presented in DL rather than MOS. Further empirical studies are needed to explain these unexpected results and to see whether they hold for other types of task.
KW - ontologies
KW - OWL
KW - DL
KW - Manchester OWL Syntax
KW - usability
M3 - Conference contribution with ISSN or ISBN
SN - 9783319682877
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 20
EP - 36
BT - ISWC2017 The 16th International Semantic Web Conference
PB - Springer
CY - Vienna
T2 - ISWC2017 The 16th International Semantic Web Conference
Y2 - 4 October 2017
ER -
