Ontology of the “Software Usability” Domain

• Main Authors: A. A. Sytnik, T. E. Shulga, N. A. Danilov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2018-10-01
• Series: Труды Института системного программирования РАН
• Subjects: удобство использования программного обеспечения; пользовательский интерфейс; онтология; онтологический инжиниринг
• Online Access: https://ispranproceedings.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/488

The article presents the ontology of the "Software usability" domain. Authors provides the review of existing ontologies for “user interface” and “software” domains. The article describes the advantages that can give its use in the analysis and evaluation of software products usability, e.g.: opened data structure for more easily data sharing. The paper presents a class diagram of the proposed ontology and a text description for the classes, object properties and data properties. Presented diagrams contains basic classes (device, session, user, region, variation, image) and subclasses for the event class. Examples of questions that can be answered by ontology are given. e.g.: “What commands are made by users in the region?” and “What variations of the region are in the session?”. Also, the article presents the SPARQL queries that may be used for this ontology. The classification of possible methods of analysis and evaluation of usability on the basis of the ontology is proposed and some of them are described. An example of the user activity data in a standard RDF/XML format is demonstrated. Described ontology "Software Usability" designed for the user activity data representation. Experiments have shown that ontology can be used to analyze the usability of desktop applications for Windows operating systems, including the construction of heat maps. Heat map based on the collected user activity data in is shown. In addition, ontology can be used and extended by any researchers involved in the problems of ease of use of software interfaces, in particular in experiments with different types of interfaces. The authors will welcome comments and suggestions on the refinement and development of ontology from experts in the domain and are ready to cooperate.