BiOnIC: A Catalog of User Interactions with Biomedical Ontologies

Abstract

BiOnIC is a catalog of aggregated statistics of user clicks, queries, and reuse counts for access to over 200 biomedical ontologies. BiOnIC also provides anonymized sequences of classes accessed by users over a period of four years. To generate the statistics, we processed the access logs of BioPortal, a large open biomedical ontology repository. We publish the BiOnIC data using DCAT and SKOS metadata standards. The BiOnIC catalog has a wide range of applicability, which we demonstrate through its use in three different types of applications. To our knowledge, this type of interaction data stemming from a real-world, large-scale application has not been published before. We expect that the catalog will become an important resource for researchers and developers in the Semantic Web community by providing novel insights into how ontologies are explored, queried and reused. The BiOnIC catalog may ultimately assist in the more informed development of intelligent user interfaces for semantic resources through interface customization, prediction of user browsing and querying behavior, and ontology summarization. The BiOnIC catalog is available at: http://onto-apps.stanford.edu/bionic.

Analyzing user interactions with biomedical ontologies: A visual perspective

“…To further strengthen the generalization of our results, more analyses need to be carried out on datasets generated by other applications. To encourage other researchers to continue this research, we have processed and published the user interaction datasets used in this study at: http://onto-apps.stanford.edu/bionic under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license [11]. We have also released the source code used to generate the statistics and the visualizations in this paper at: https://github.com/maulikkamdar/PolygOnto.…”

“…The datasets used in this study have also been published as TSV and RDF files at: http://onto-apps.stanford.edu/bionic under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license [11].…”

A Framework to Conduct and Report on Empirical User Studies in Semantic Web Contexts

“…Some recent works by the SW community have focused on building resources to foster the evaluation of user interfaces and interactive Semantic Web tools. A catalog of aggregated statistics on user interactions with over 200 BioPortal ontologies was recently released, containing information of user clicks, queries and reuse counts for over half a million users in a 3-year period [26]. Dragisic et al [12] have created benchmarks that simulate different levels of user expertise to evaluate robustness of interactive ontology alignment systems.…”