Cognitive Support for Human-Guided Mapping Systems

The semantic web envisions the Internet as a globally linked database, one that supports data interoperability and machine readable semantics. The “back-bone” of the semantic web is structural representations of domains of knowledge in the form of ontologies. A critical prerequisite to supporting this global information exchange is that mappings must exist between domain related ontologies. The process of mapping one ontology to another is far from a fully automated task. Generally, it is necessary for a human to verify and fine-tune the mappings generated by ontology mapping tools. The research focus has been primarily on the automation of this process and has largely ignored the user. We believe that in order for mapping tools to move beyond research labs we need to begin focusing on the user’s needs during the mapping process. In this project, we discuss the first step towards reaching this goal, a pilot user study where we investigate the human decision making process during an ontology mapping task. Based on the data collected, our goal is to gain a detailed understanding of the aforementioned process and develop design requirements that if implemented, will help reduce the cognitive load of the mapping users.