Assessment of Ontology-based Tools: Systemizing the Scenario Approach

Scenarios have been already used for designing and evaluating ontology-based tools. For example, the so-called “motivating scenarios” are a core component of the TOVE ontological engineering method elaborated by Grüninger and Fox (1995; Uschold and Grüninger, 1996). We ourselves used a “scenario approach” for designing and evaluating CoMMA, a corporate memory computer platform based on ontologies and agents; the approach was inspired by the scenario approaches proposed in the HCI and CSCW communities, which we consider more user-oriented than the “motivating scenarios” approach. In this paper, we account for our CoMMA experience and its major lesson: the necessity to apply the scenario approach more systematically for assessing the usability and utility of ontology-based tools.