Evaluating the Efficiency of Nuclear Medicine Ontology in Knowledge Representation and Concepts Retrieval by Ontometric approach

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to evaluate the efficiency of the Nuclear Medicine Ontology (NucMedOnt) based on the ontometric method with the criteria of content display, content, user understanding of content, search, and retrieval of concepts.Methods: The current research is of applied type. Evaluation of NucMedOnt ontology was carried out with a qualitative approach in the form of a usability study using the usability test followed by a questionnaire survey, constructed with an Ontometric approach and Likert scale (Fathian, 2010). The sample population consisted of 10 faculty members and subject specialists in the Nuclear Medicine field, selected by using the Purposive sampling method from 26 specialists in Physics, Radiological Engineering, Nuclear Pharmacology, and Medical Physics fields, working in the specialized center with experience using the INIS Thesaurus and announced their cooperation. For evaluation, 10 randomly selected concepts in the field of nuclear medicine were provided to the participants.Findings: 94% of the users were satisfied with the performance of content display criteria, 100% with concepts criteria, 98% with relationships criteria, 93% with the instance criteria, 98% with the users' content perception criteria, and 89% of the users were satisfied with the content search and retrieval criteria of the Nuclear Medicine Ontology (NucMedOnt) and evaluated their effectiveness as desirable and appropriate.Also, there was no significant difference between the opinions of experts in the user’s content perception criteria, content criteria, content display criteria, and content search and retrieval criteria in the Nuclear Medicine Ontology (NucMedOnt).Conclusions: Nuclear Medicine Ontology (NucMedOnt) is an effective tool for knowledge representation and upgrading the databases of the Nuclear Medicine field. The results show the high satisfaction of the participants with the efficiency of knowledge representation and concepts search and retrieval in the Nuclear Medicine Ontology (NucMedOnt). The rich set of basic concepts and also the citation on the publishing information resources of the Nuclear Medicine Field in the documentation of the Persian equivalents for the English concepts were among the reasons for the high satisfaction of the Nuclear Medicine specialists and the high score in their evaluation.

Keywords

• ontology evaluation
• usability test
• knowledge representation
• concept retrieval
• nuclear medicine ontology