2 research outputs found
The Efficacy of OWL and DL on User Understanding of Axioms and Their Entailments
OWL is recognized as the de facto standard notation for on-
tology engineering. The Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS) was developed
as an alternative to symbolic description logic (DL) and it is believed
to be more e ective for users. This paper sets out to test that belief
from two perspectives by evaluating how accurately and quickly people
understand the informational content of axioms and derive inferences
from them. By conducting a between-group empirical study, involving
60 novice participants, we found that DL is just as e ective as MOS for
people's understanding of axioms. Moreover, for two types of inference
problems, DL supported signi cantly better task performance than MOS,
yet MOS never signi cantly outperformed DL. These surprising results
suggest that the belief that MOS is more e ective than DL, at least for
these types of task, is unfounded. An outcome of this research is the
suggestion that ontology axioms, when presented to non-experts, may
be better presented in DL rather than MOS. Further empirical studies
are needed to explain these unexpected results and to see whether they
hold for other types of task