A Method for Detecting Behavior-Based User Profiles in Collaborative Ontology Engineering

Collaborative ontology-engineering methods usually prescribe a set of processes, activities, types of stakeholders and the roles each stakeholder plays in these activities. We, however, believe that the stakeholder community of each ontology-engineering project is different and one can therefore observe different types of user behavior. It may thus very well be that the prescribed set of stakeholder types and roles do not suffice. If one were able to identify these user behavior types, which we will call a user profile, one can compliment or revisit those predefined roles. For instance, those user profiles can be used to provide customized interfaces for optimizing activities in certain ontology-engineering projects. We present a method that discovers different user profiles based on the interactions users have with each other in a collaborative ontology-engineering environment. Our approach clusters the users based on the types of interactions they perform, which are retrieved from datasets that were annotated with an interaction ontology – built on top of SIOC – that we have developed. We demonstrate our method using the database of two instances of the GOSPL ontologyengineering tool. The databases contain the interactions of two distinct ontology-engineering projects involving S. Van Laere · R. Buyl · M. Nyssen Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Public Health, Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (BISI) Research Group, Laarbeeklaan 103, 1090 Jette, Belgium Tel.: +32-2-477-4444, Fax: +32-2-477-4000, E-mail: {svvlaere,rbuyl,mnyssen}@vub.ac.be C. Debruyne ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland WISE Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium E-mail: [email protected] respectively 42 and 36 users. For each dataset, we discuss the findings by analyzing the different clusters. We found that we are able to discover different user profiles, indicating that the approach we have taken is viable, though more experiments are needed to validate the results.