A Systems Approach to User Evaluation of Biomedical Ontologies

Several ontologies attempting to combine biomedical data using various strategies in order to overcome issues of scope and differing levels of granularity have emerged. However, these ontologies are little used in distributed applications. This is attributed to both the lack of knowledge about user needs for such systems and the absence of a general framework to assess their relative suitability for specific applications. In this paper, a framework to address this problem by relating user needs to ontology characteristic is proposed. Systems theory is used to explain the dynamics of a biomedical environment by providing feedbacks from the evaluation process to the user needs for integration systems. The framework has been validated using a descriptive field study. The results indicate that it is sufficiently flexible for evaluating ontology based biomedical integrated systems, taking into account the conflicting needs of different users interested in accessing complex libraries of biomedical data.