Towards a New Method for Developing Objective Quality Taxonomies

A new method to develop an objective Quality Taxonomy for an interactive auditory virtual environment (AVE) with the help of a DELPHI expert survey is presented. The development process with the steps: purpose identification, building, evaluation and documentation is explained. The Quality Taxonomy developed here includes the descriptive and relation orientated characterisation. Additionally, it is expanded by a quantitative component (weighting factors for the relations) – unlike the standard taxonomies or ontologies. The resulting taxonomy for the application ‘edutainment’ scenario presents clearly the multivariate character of the involved relations between the quality elements (in the physical domain) and quality features (in the perceptual domain). No listening experiments are necessary to develop such a Quality Taxonomy with this method, only a sufficient number of experts having experience in this field. Further, when a large number of experts participate in developing a taxonomy using the proposed methodology, a high degree of objectivity in the results is obtained.