Abstract
To find ways to facilitate the querying process of heterogeneous databases reveals a critical research avenue, especially in biology. Making use of ontologies is considered one of the best solutions, which makes the activity of ontology design critical for biologists. However, such design process is not easily attainable by non-experts, issue sublimated by the constant evolution of the domain taxonomies [1]. Moreover, designing ontologies currently requires some expert knowledge of the domain as well as skills in database and ontology modelling. This fact was corroborated by our pilot study involving geneticists from the Poitiers hospital. The specialists did not possess any prior knowledge of conceptual data models. Nevertheless, they were able to build their own mental model of the situation that could later be correlated to the actual database models.
Compared to previous End-User Programming approaches, this experiment shows that End-User Programming techniques permit to build and use conceptual models without any need for specific training. In this poster, we describe the pilot study we conducted using geneticists during the dedicated ontologies design process that allows querying public databases. Several specific constraints were identified, along with their proposed solutions. A complete example of ontology design, built from the genetic field, is then described.