The Design of an Ontology Management Tool

Sammanfattning

Semantic modeling aims to create a common understanding from different perspectives. In particular, the goal of semantic data modeling is to create a better understanding of the human, the data, and their relation to computer systems. This thesis aims to create a management tool for semantic data modeling for Pinteg, a company engaged in data privacy and protection. The design process of the thesis is divided into four phases, where the first phase creates an understanding of the project and product, and the other three phases iterate through creating, refining, and evaluating the product. These phases applied relevant interaction design theory and handled both paper and digital versions. Through iterative cycles of designing and prototyping, usability testing, and evaluation with the stakeholders, these prototypes evolved into more refined versions. The mid-fi prototypes were developed in Figma, and finally, the hi-fi prototypes were created with the frontend framework React. The design process accumulated in a final prototype, and the evaluation concluded future development. The results showed that the concept of ontologies was difficult to explain to users with a limited background in semantic data modeling. Even when given a context, there is no natural conceptual connection to the concept of semantics. In the future, the applications' purpose can be taken in different directions. One natural direction is to use the tool as a straightforward ontology manager, similar to existing alternatives, which requires the user to be familiar with the concepts. Another direction could be to make the tool similar to other community-driven platforms. In this case, it could be beneficial to use established features like subscriptions. In either case, version control would be necessary to handle different resource versions deriving from the same resource, and to keep track of history.