pdf 820Kb - INSEAD CALT

Evaluation report of the use of Onto-Logging
platform in the user site
Deliverable ID: D8b
Some other reasons were suggested bellow by the ontology engineer of Indra:
Page : 56 of 110
Version: 1.0
Date: 27 january 2004
Status: Final
Confid.: Public
One important problem of the ontology was located in some concepts. These concepts
weren’t too clear to users, so they misused it, causing some chaos in the information. This
problem was related with the terminology (proposed reason 3), because some of the
problematic concepts weren’t used in daily work, and also related with consensus about
concepts (proposed reason 4), because if a concept is not specific, each user will apply his or
her own idea of the concept.
For example:
• Term and Topic were fuzzy concepts, so people tend to use it for everything they did not
know where to put. Therefore the instances for these two concepts were totally
heterogeneous because the name of the concept was too general, so each user had are own
meaning.
• Technology and its sub-concepts: some of these concepts refer to similar ideas (software,
operating systems, commercial products), some of them were useless (requirements), or
some were too general (services). The consequence of these problems was that nobody
used these concepts and their instances homogeneously.
In case of other concepts, the problem was with the nomenclature or formats: the format for
dates, for numbers. For example, in the attribute duration of a project, the unit was not
specified, so each user had its own idea about the format: using months, years, days, the
initial and final date of the project.
Therefore, a first conclusion may be that it is very important to use specific concepts, in order
to avoid misunderstandings. Although the DUI includes the possibility of adding some kind
of help to users (specifying the format and a brief tool-tip for each concept), it would be very
interesting that it would be possible attaching a description to each concept of the ontology,
making this description or help available in the DUI. This way, the users can always review
the help for a concept in order to clarify their doubts without receiving a previous course
about the ontology. For example: “The organizations related with an operation using the
relationship -implies- can be clients, partners, providers…”
Regarding the reasons 1, these were clearly present in the Documents concepts definition.
This definition was very scarce, so it was difficult to distinguish the different types of
documents involved in a proposal or in a project. Also the original ontology didn’t include
the option to relate a Proposa l to the corresponding project (if the proposal is awarded).
The ontology was also uncompleted in people definition, because there was only a concept
for all the people. In the new ontology this has been addressed including three sub-concepts
of the “People” concept.