MSc Defence – Maryam Alipour-Aghdam

Posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2014

Written by Dan Gillis

The School of Computer Science is pleased to announce the following MSc Defence, Ontology-Driven Generic Questionnaire Design, presented by MSc Candidate Maryam Alipour-Aghdam.

The defence will take place August 22, 2014 in Reynolds 219 at 1:30 pm.

Title

Ontology-Driven Generic Questionnaire Design

Abstract

Computer based questionnaires have an important role in collecting data in different domains. As the use of computer-based questionnaires has been increased in different domains, each of them uses different techniques to create and design the questionnaire. The main tools that have been used to create questionnaires in different domains mostly do not make use of semantic web technologies and consist of large amounts of hard coding.  No generic questionnaire exists that has available sources so each different domain can create changes to its design by developers. This study has three major goals: (1) to use ontologies to facilitate computer based questionnaire design by creating a generic questionnaire ontology that can be used in various domains; (2) to merge different domain ontologies with the questionnaire ontology so they can be used as an error checking mechanism during questionnaire creation; (3) to modify the questionnaire content when the domain ontology content have been modified. Three proposed prototype systems have been designed and implemented in this study to demonstrate these goals. It was concluded that ontologies can be used to facilitate computer based questionnaire creation by using a generic questionnaire ontology. Furthermore, the study indicates that merging different domain ontologies into questionnaire ontologies can be used as an error checking mechanism while creating a questionnaire. In addition, the study proves that if the content of domain ontology is modified, questionnaire contents that were already merged with a domain ontology will be changed according to the domain ontology content to protect the accuracy of questionnaire contents.

Advisor: Deborah Stacey

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