Antipattern Comprehension: An Empirical Evaluation

Comprehension of justifications is known to be difficult for even experienced ontology engineers, and much more so for other stakeholders. In this paper, we present two methods for displaying justifications using concept diagrams: using multiple concept diagrams to represent the justification (one diagram for each axiom); and using a merged concept diagram to represent all axioms in the justification. We performed an empirical evaluation of both methods along with a textual representation of the justification using Protégé. The results were that novice users could both more accurately and more quickly identify an incoherence when using merged diagrams than using multiple diagrams or Protégé statements.