Usability evaluation in the SEWASIE (SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies) project

In this paper we describe the usability evaluation experiments of the Query tool system done in the context of the SEWASIE (SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies) project. The usability evaluation is an important step of the User-Centered Design Methodology, followed to develop the SEWASIE system. This European IST project aims at enabling a uniform access to heterogeneous data sources through an integrated ontology. From the architectural point of view, it is composed of different tools, in particular, the Query tool allows the user to construct the query by a focus plus context diagrammatic interface generating precise and unambiguous query expressions. The main goal of our experiment is to demonstrate the easy of use of the Query tool independently of the domain user experience. This study confirms that the Query tool system is usable as for the end users (domain-expert users) as for the non-domain expert users.